How to Check a Casino Licence Yourself: A Register-by-Register Guide

A casino licence is only as real as the regulator’s own register says it is. The badge in the footer, the line in the terms and the sentence in an affiliate review are all claims; the register is the record. Checking one against the other takes about five minutes, costs nothing and needs no special tools, only the legal name of the company behind the site and the patience to type a regulator’s address yourself instead of clicking a logo.

This guide shows how to check a casino licence at the registers that matter for the brands we cover (Curaçao, Anjouan, the United Kingdom and the Philippines), and then reports what happened when we ran all ten casinos we review through those registers on 30 September 2026. The short version: three sites named a company that we found on a register with a current status, one resolved only through the regulator’s own certificate page, three named no company at all, and three make no licence claim to check. One licence that third-party listings still attribute to a major brand turned out to have been revoked in July.

The Five-Minute Method

1. Find the legal entity, not the brand. Registers list companies, not logos. Scroll to the footer or open the terms and look for a sentence of the form “X is operated by Y Ltd, registration number Z, licensed by…”. Write down the company name, its registration number, the licence number and the regulator. If no company is named anywhere, the check ends here, and that absence is the finding.
2. Go to the regulator’s site under your own steam. Type the address or find it through a search engine. A footer seal is only evidence when it opens a page on the regulator’s own domain showing the same company and the domain you are on.
3. Search by company name first, then licence number, then domain. Brand names often return nothing, because the licence belongs to the company.
4. Read the status and the dates. “Valid”, “Active” or “Indefinite” are what you want to see. “Assessment in progress”, “Expired”, “Surrendered”, “Inactive” and “Revoked” each mean something other than licensed, and an expiry date that has already passed should stop you.
5. Check the domain you are actually on. Where a register lists domains, the address in your browser should be among them. Mirror domains usually are not.
6. Check the enforcement list and save a dated screenshot. Several regulators publish revocations separately from the main register. A screenshot with the date on it is exactly the evidence you will want if a dispute ever reaches the stage described in our guide to what to do when a casino won’t pay out.

Register by Register

Curaçao: the Curaçao Gaming Authority

Curaçao is the licence most often quoted by the casinos we review, and its register is the least convenient to use. The “License register” page on cga.cw links four PDFs instead of a search box: land-based casinos, online gaming licences, certificates, and an enforcement register. The online gaming list we downloaded was marked “Last updated September 21, 2026”, ran to 28 pages and 665 numbered entries, and gives for each one a licence number, the licensee’s legal name, whether it is a B2C or B2B licence, its Curaçao company registration number, the issue and expiry dates, and a status.

It does not list brands or domains. You need the company name from the casino’s footer, and the company registration number, where the footer gives one, is the most reliable thing to match on. Open the PDF and use your browser’s find function.

The statuses are worth reading closely. Many entries carry an expiry date six months after issue; a large group is marked “Indefinite”; many say “Assessment in progress”; some say “Expired”; and a run at the end reads “Revoked as of” a given date, often “at the request of the operator”. The separate enforcement register, which listed 32 licences when we read it, covers those the authority has revoked or declined to extend. Check both documents, because a company can be missing from the first and present in the second.

Two details save time. Current licence numbers begin with OGL/ or CGA/. Curaçao replaced its old gambling law on 24 December 2024, and the authority now licenses operators directly, so a footer that still quotes only “Curaçao eGaming”, or an old-style master-licence number ending in /JAZ, is describing the previous system. The question to ask is whether the company appears in today’s register. And the authority says of its own lists that “no rights can be derived from these overviews”, which is a reminder that a register is a snapshot on a date, so note the date.

Licensed operators can also display a digital certificate. A genuine one opens on the authority’s certificate portal at cert.cga.cw and states the domain, the operating company, the licence number and its current status in one place.

Anjouan: the Anjouan Gaming Authority

The register at anjouangaming.com is the easiest of the four to use. It has a single search box that accepts a company name, a licence number or a domain, and on the day we looked it counted 1,540 licences. Each row shows the company, a status, the licence number, the licence type, the issue and expiry dates and, usefully, the domains the licence covers. That last column answers the question Curaçao’s PDF cannot: is the address in my browser actually included?

Anjouan, an island in the Union of the Comoros, is a light-touch jurisdiction, and a register entry there proves that a licence exists, not that the oversight behind it is demanding. We also came across a second website publishing a separate “register of gaming licenses” with a different number format. The ALSI-numbered licences quoted by the casinos in this guide resolve on anjouangaming.com, which is where to look if a footer quotes a number beginning ALSI.

United Kingdom: the Gambling Commission

The Gambling Commission’s register of gambling businesses is the most detailed of the four. It can be searched “by business name, trading name, domain name or account number”, held 2,635 records on the day we looked, and gives each business its own page showing every licensed activity with its status and dates, the trading names, the domain names (each marked Active, Inactive or White Label) and any regulatory actions. The Commission notes that it “cannot guarantee the accuracy of information provided by third parties”, which covers the domain and trading names that businesses submit themselves.

The point to understand is scope. A UK licence covers the British-facing domain that is listed, not the brand worldwide. Asia-facing brands tend to appear here only as white-label domains under another company’s licence, as two of the examples below show, and that entry does nothing for a player who registered on the international site.

The Philippines: PAGCOR and CEZA

PAGCOR publishes its lists as PDFs on the Electronic Gaming Licensing page of pagcor.ph: accredited gaming system administrators with their registered brands and domain names, the registered brands and domains of licensed casinos, and the licensees for gaming venue operations. The brand and domain lists we downloaded were dated 17 September 2026, so they are current, and because they name brands and domains they are easy to search.

They are also domestic. The venue list carries a printed caution that the entities on it “are not licensed to operate offshore gaming operations or POGO”, and Executive Order No. 74, issued in November 2024, banned offshore and internet gaming licensees and required those operations to cease by 31 December 2024. The practical reading is simple. If a casino aimed at Malaysia or Singapore says it is PAGCOR-licensed, its brand or domain should appear on PAGCOR’s current lists. If it does not, the claim has nothing behind it that you can see.

CEZA, the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority, is harder. We could not find a public list of gaming licensees on ceza.gov.ph. The only public tool is a company-name checker for enterprises registered in the zone, which is no help when a casino’s site names no company. A “CEZA” or “First Cagayan” claim is therefore one we could not check from the outside, and we record it as unverified and do not count it as a licence.

Malta and the rest

The Malta Gaming Authority publishes a licensee register on mga.org.mt, and the same method applies there and at any other regulator: company name, licence number, status, domain. None of the ten casinos we review claims a Malta licence, so we did not run that register for this guide.

What Happened When We Checked Ten Casinos

On 30 September 2026 we opened each casino’s site, using the link in our own review or the brand’s main address, and read the footer, the About page and the terms for a company name and a licence claim. Most sites served us their Malaysian or Singaporean versions. W88’s main address did not load for us, so we read a W88-branded site at another address. We then searched the registers above for whatever each site named.

Casino	What the site named	What the registers showed
BK8	Mettlemind Tech Ltd, Anjouan, licence ALSI-202504032-FI2	Anjouan: Valid, B2C, 29 April 2025 to 28 April 2027. Domains listed: bk8.co, bk8.com, bk8.io, bk8premier.com, bk8sports.com
me88	S Tier Solutions Ltd (Belize), Anjouan, licence ALSI-202606029-FI1	Anjouan: Valid, B2C, 12 June 2026 to 11 June 2027. Domains listed: me88.com, me88pro.net
Dafabet	Osmila N.V., Curaçao, company registration 102267	Curaçao: OGL/2024/1276/0583, B2C, issued 15 April 2026, expires 15 October 2026. UK: dafabet.co.uk is a White Label domain under SCGO Limited (account 44662, licences Active)
1xBet	No company on the mirror we were served	Curaçao: Caecus N.V., OGL/2024/1262/0493, B2C, Indefinite, and a certificate page on cert.cga.cw names 1xbet.com under that number. UK: no result
Maxim88	No company, regulator or licence number on the home or About page	No match in the Anjouan register, the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists
96M	No company, regulator or licence number on the home page	No match in the Anjouan register, the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists
W88	A licence box in the footer, left empty	No match in the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists. UK: w88.co.uk is an Inactive domain under BXO Holdings Limited
Mega888	No licence claimed, as our review records	Nothing to look up. No match in the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists
918Kiss	No licence claimed, as our review records	Nothing to look up. No match in the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists
Starbuck88	No licence claimed, as our review records	Nothing to look up. No match in the Curaçao list or PAGCOR’s brand lists

Our reviews were last verified on 22 July 2026, before these lookups. Where a review’s licence line differs from this table, this table is the newer record.

A licence can move, and the old one can be revoked

In July our BK8 review recorded a Curaçao claim that we could not resolve to a licence number. On 30 September the BK8 site named a different company and a different regulator, Mettlemind Tech Ltd under an Anjouan licence, and that one resolves as Valid. Meanwhile the Curaçao enforcement register lists Black Hawk Technology B.V., licence OGL/2024/132/1011, as revoked with effect from 9 July 2026. Third-party casino listings attribute BK8 to that company, and a BK8 trademark filing names the similarly named Black Hawk Technology Co. Ltd. The register gives no reason for the revocation and we draw none. The lesson is narrower and more useful: a licence claim has a shelf life, and a review, ours included, can be out of date within weeks.

me88 followed the same path. Our review recorded Curaçao and PAGCOR claims that did not resolve; the site now names S Tier Solutions Ltd under an Anjouan licence, and that entry is Valid.

The domain you are on may not be the domain that is licensed

BK8’s register entry lists five domains. The BK8 site we reached sat on a mirror address that is not one of them. The same was true of me88, whose entry lists two domains, neither of which was the address in our browser. Rotating mirrors are routine for operators working around network blocks in Malaysia and Singapore, but a licence that lists domains covers the domains it lists. If yours is not there, the register entry does not vouch for the site in front of you, and a convincing copy is exactly what a phishing clone looks like.

One brand, several licences, different customers

Dafabet’s international site names Osmila N.V., and that company is on the Curaçao list with a matching registration number. Its British site, dafabet.co.uk, is a white-label domain under SCGO Limited’s UK licence. Those are two different legal arrangements protecting two different groups of customers. Our Dafabet review had also recorded Philippine licence claims and a UK register entry under another company name; on 30 September neither PAGCOR list showed the brand, and a register search for that company name returned no result. Which licence applies to you depends entirely on which site you registered at.

Silence is a result

Maxim88, 96M and W88 named no operating company on the pages we read, so there was nothing to search a register for. In Maxim88’s case our July review recorded Curaçao and PAGCOR claims in the footer; on the Singapore-facing site we reached in September those lines were not there. A casino that will not tell you which company holds your money has made verification impossible, and for practical purposes an unverifiable licence protects you exactly as much as no licence. We keep the running status for all ten in our licence verification table.

What a Register Entry Does Not Tell You

A verified licence is a minimum, and it is worth being exact about what it leaves out.

It does not make play legal where you live. Licensing is about the operator; the law that applies to you is the law of the country you are sitting in, and in several of the markets we cover that law prohibits online casino play whatever the operator holds.

It does not mean anyone will take up your complaint. The Curaçao Gaming Authority states that it “does not handle individual complaints against gaming providers”, and Anjouan’s authority says it “does not handle, mediate, or adjudicate player complaints”. Both point players to the operator first and then to an independent dispute body, which the Curaçao certificates list and the Anjouan site each name.

It does not mean the operator pays quickly. A licensed casino will still ask for identity documents before it releases a withdrawal, and that is the stage where most disputes start. Our casino KYC guide covers what to expect and how to avoid the common delays.

And it is not permanent. The Curaçao list alone showed dozens of expired and revoked entries on the day we read it.

Red Flags Worth Acting On

• No company name anywhere on the site. Nothing else on this list matters until there is one.
• A regulator named with no licence number, or a number with no regulator.
• A seal that is only an image, or one that opens a page on the casino’s own domain.
• An old-format Curaçao reference, such as “Curaçao eGaming” or a number ending in /JAZ, with no OGL/ or CGA/ number beside it.
• “PAGCOR licensed” on a site aimed outside the Philippines whose brand is not on PAGCOR’s current lists.
• A UK or Malta licence claimed by a site with no UK or European presence. Search the register; it takes a minute.
• A status other than valid: expired, surrendered, inactive, under assessment or revoked.
• A licensed company, but not your domain.

If the Licence Does Not Check Out

Do not deposit. If you already hold a balance, request a withdrawal, complete any identity check promptly and keep dated screenshots of both the footer claim and your register search. Do not accept a new offer in the meantime, since new terms are the usual way a withdrawal gets delayed.

If you are choosing between sites, prefer the one whose company, licence number, status and domain all line up on the regulator’s own pages, and remember that even then you have confirmed the floor, not the ceiling.

The Bottom Line

Checking a casino licence is a matter of four facts on one official page: the company, the number, the status and the domain. Three of the ten casinos we review cleared that bar when we ran the check, one cleared it through the regulator’s certificate and not its own site, and six gave us either nothing to search for or no claim at all. Two of the three that cleared it had changed regulator since our reviews were written, which is the best argument we can offer for doing the check yourself, on the day you intend to deposit, instead of trusting anyone’s summary of it. We will repeat these lookups at each review refresh and date every result.