How to check any online casino's licence
There’s no single global register you can search the way you’d search a national database — licensing for online casinos is split across several regulators with very different levels of public transparency, and one of the biggest, Curaçao, doesn’t run a number-lookup tool at all anymore. Checking a licence now means knowing which regulator you’re dealing with and what kind of proof that regulator actually makes available.
Where the licence information lives
A legitimate operator discloses its licence in the site footer or on a dedicated “Licensing” / “About us” page — the regulator’s name, a licence or registration number, and usually the name of the corporate entity actually holding it (which is often not the consumer-facing brand name). If none of that is there, and there’s no explanation anywhere on the site, that’s the first and clearest signal something’s off.
Copy the licence number exactly as printed rather than retyping a paraphrased version — formatting matters when you go to cross-check it.
The regulators you’ll actually run into
| Regulator | Typical reach | Public licence lookup |
|---|---|---|
| Curaçao Gaming Authority | The largest share of internationally facing casinos | No live number-lookup as of the 2023–2025 licensing reform — the old master-licence/sub-licensee system was replaced by direct licensing, and a public search tool hasn’t replaced it yet |
| Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) | Smaller roster, generally tighter compliance requirements | Yes — searchable register on the MGA’s own site |
| Kahnawake Gaming Commission | Operators licensed through the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake | Yes — public register |
| UK Gambling Commission | Only the subset of operators still serving Great Britain specifically | Yes — public register |
| No licence disclosed | Offshore or genuinely unregulated | Not applicable — there’s no regulator to check |
Curaçao’s shift is the one that trips people up, because the old system used to let you search a sub-licence number on a master licence holder’s page. That page is largely gone, and the Curaçao Gaming Control Board’s own public-facing verification tools are limited. In practice, that means Curaçao-licensed operators are verified indirectly rather than through a live database lookup.
How to actually verify it
- Check the footer or licensing page first. Note the regulator, the licence number and the legal entity name.
- Search the regulator’s own register, where one exists. MGA, Kahnawake and the UKGC all publish searchable registers — use the exact number from the footer.
- Cross-check against independent aggregators such as casino.guru, askgamblers.com and lcb.org. These sites track licensing status, revocations and complaint history across operators and regulators, including the Curaçao brands that don’t have a live government lookup — they’re the practical substitute for a missing public registry.
- Read a few recent complaint threads, not just the star rating. A pattern of unresolved withdrawal disputes tells you more about how a licence is actually being honoured than the fact of holding one.
No licence isn’t automatically the same as a scam
Holding a licence, wherever it’s from, means an operator passed some level of fit-and-proper and financial checks and is nominally answerable to a regulator if something goes wrong. Not holding one removes that channel — there’s no one to file a complaint with beyond the operator itself. That’s a real difference, but it’s a difference in how much diligence the burden falls on you to do, not an automatic verdict. Plenty of licensed operators have poor payout records, and an unlicensed one isn’t inherently fraudulent — it’s just unverified, which means the aggregator complaint history, how long the brand has actually been operating, and whether payouts are reported as clearing on time all matter more than they would for a heavily regulated brand.
Treat a licence as one input, not the whole answer. The regulator tells you who to escalate to if things go wrong; it doesn’t tell you whether things are likely to go wrong in the first place. That second question is answered by the operator’s actual track record, which is exactly what independent review sites exist to document.