Guías · actualizado el 2026-08-30

How to check a bookmaker is actually licensed

What a gambling licence gives you in practice, how to verify one on the regulator's own register in two minutes, and the real difference between a tier-one licence and a Curaçao one.

Escrito y mantenido por Marek Ohanka, editor, WhichBookmaker

Every betting site displays a licence badge in its footer. The badge is an image. Anyone can put an image on a website.

Verifying the licence takes about two minutes and tells you something that no review — including ours — can tell you as authoritatively as the regulator itself: whether this operator is permitted to take your money where you live, and who you can complain to if something goes wrong.

What a licence actually gives you

The badge is not a quality mark. It is a set of specific, enforceable obligations. Under a serious regulator, these are the ones that matter:

Segregated customer funds. Your balance must be held separately from the company’s operating money, so that a business failure does not automatically take your deposit with it. Levels of protection differ, and regulators usually require operators to state theirs.

A complaints route that ends somewhere. Licensed operators must offer independent dispute resolution — a third party that can rule against them. Without a licence, an operator’s final answer is its own customer-service email, and there is nobody above it.

Enforced self-exclusion. A licence obliges the operator to honour deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion requests, and in some markets to participate in a national scheme covering every licensed site at once.

Identity and age verification. Required before you can stake or withdraw. It is a friction most people resent until they consider what its absence would mean.

Advertising rules. What the operator may promise, how it must present risk, and — increasingly — what bonus terms it may impose. In Great Britain, reforms that took effect on 19 January 2026 capped bonus wagering requirements at ten times the bonus and banned offers bundling several gambling products together.

None of that exists on an unlicensed site. The money is not ring-fenced, the complaint has no destination, and the self-exclusion is a suggestion.

How to verify one, properly

Step one: find the claim. Scroll to the operator’s footer. A licensed site states the licensing body, the licence number and the company that holds it. Vagueness here — “licensed and regulated internationally” — is itself the answer.

Step two: go to the regulator, not the link. Do not click the badge. Open the regulator’s own website separately and use its public register. A badge can link anywhere; a register cannot be faked.

  • Great Britain — the Gambling Commission publishes a public register of licensees at gamblingcommission.gov.uk.
  • Ontario — the AGCO and iGaming Ontario publish the list of registered operators; only those may serve Ontario residents.
  • Colombia — Coljuegos lists its licensed concessionaires.
  • Brazil — the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas licenses fixed-odds betting, and authorised operators use .bet.br domains. That domain suffix is a fast first check.
  • Mexico — permits are issued through SEGOB, typically via a licensed local partner.
  • Peru — MINCETUR operates the licensing regime.
  • Nigeria — the National Lottery Regulatory Commission and state boards such as the Lagos State Lotteries Board.
  • South Africa — betting is licensed by provincial boards. Note that online casino play is not legal there at all, so a site offering it to South African customers is not operating within the law whatever its footer says.

Step three: check the company name matches. Licences are held by companies, not brands. A large group may run several brands under one licence, which is normal — but the licence should name a company that plausibly connects to the site you are on. If you cannot find the connection, treat that as a red flag.

Step four: confirm it covers your country. A licence is jurisdictional. A Maltese licence is a real licence and says nothing about whether the operator may serve customers in Britain, Ontario or Brazil. This is the single most common misunderstanding.

Tier-one licences versus Curaçao

Not all licences carry the same weight, and it is not snobbery to say so.

Tier-one regulators — the UK Gambling Commission, provincial Canadian regulators, Coljuegos, Brazil’s SPA and their equivalents — combine active supervision, meaningful penalties and a dispute-resolution route with teeth. They audit, they fine, and they revoke.

Curaçao has historically operated on a very different model: a small number of master licences under which large numbers of sub-licences were issued, with limited ongoing supervision and no comparable route for a customer whose complaint is refused. The jurisdiction has been reforming its framework and moving towards direct licensing, but the practical position for a bettor today remains weaker: fewer obligations on the operator, and materially less recourse if a dispute goes badly.

That does not make a Curaçao-licensed operator dishonest. Several are long-established, competent businesses, and in markets where no local regime exists they may be the only option. It does mean the protection behind your balance is thinner, which is why operators such as 22Bet and Parimatch carry an explicit caution in our reviews and why licensing accounts for 25% of the score in our methodology.

The sensible response to a Curaçao licence is not avoidance but proportion: keep balances modest and withdraw regularly rather than treating the account as somewhere to store money.

Warning signs

  • No licence number, or a badge that links nowhere.
  • A licence that does not cover your country, presented as though it does.
  • A company name you cannot find on any register.
  • Bonus terms that contradict local rules — a wagering requirement above the local cap tells you the operator is not bound by that regulator.
  • No visible deposit limits, time-out or self-exclusion tools. These are mandatory under every serious regime.
  • Payment methods only in cryptocurrency, with no conventional local option, in a market that has a functioning regulated sector.

Availability is not legality

A site loading in your browser proves nothing about whether you may lawfully use it.

Online betting law in India is set state by state and is prohibited in several, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. Ontario permits only operators registered with iGaming Ontario, and the minimum age there is 19 rather than 18. Chile’s courts ruled in 2025 that online gambling requires express authorisation, and ordered access blocked.

We list, in each market edition of this site, only operators that hold the relevant licence or openly accept customers from that market. That is a deliberate constraint on what we publish rather than a limitation of our research — and it is why the operators shown to a reader in Lagos differ from those shown to a reader in London.