How to check a casino licence yourself
Five minutes, no tools, and it catches most of what goes wrong.
How do you check a casino licence yourself?
Find the licence number, the issuing authority and the legal entity in the terms of service, not the homepage footer alone. Then search the authority's own register, not a review site, and read the status as well as the presence: an entry can read as expired, under assessment, suspended or revoked while the operator still displays the number.
Guide last edited: no dataReviewed by CryptoGuardz Register Desk, editorial desk
Why the footer is not evidence
Almost every crypto casino displays a licence number. The number is text on a page the operator controls, and nothing about displaying it requires it to be current, to belong to that operator, or to exist at all. Checking takes about five minutes and it is the single highest-value thing a player can do before depositing.
What you are looking for is not whether a licence is claimed. It is whether the authority that supposedly issued it says so, and what status it currently carries. Those are different questions and only the second one has an answer that is not written by the operator.
Step one: find the number in a binding document
Look in the terms of service or the about page, not the homepage footer alone. You want the licence number, the issuing authority, and the name of the legal entity holding it. Note all three, because the entity name is what you will search for and it frequently differs from the brand.
If the operator names more than one entity or more than one licensor across its own documents, stop and read carefully. That inconsistency is itself a finding, and it usually indicates an un-scrubbed migration between licensing regimes.
Step two: go to the authority, not to a review site
Curaçao publishes a licensee register through the Gaming Control Board listing the licence reference, the entity, the licence type, the validity period and a current status. Anjouan operates a validator that returns the licensee name, the registered website and an operating status. Malta and the UK both publish searchable registers.
Costa Rica does not issue gambling licences at all. A Costa Rican company number is corporate registration, not gaming supervision, and it is sometimes presented in a way that blurs the two. If that is all an operator offers, there is no gambling regulator behind it.
Never take a licence number from an affiliate review site as verified. They copy each other, they go stale, and they have no incentive to check.
Step three: read the status, not just the presence
A licence appearing in a register is not the same as a licence being current. Registers carry validity periods and status fields, and an entry can read as expired, under assessment, suspended or revoked while the operator still displays the number as though nothing changed.
A term that has lapsed with renewal pending is not necessarily a scandal. Regulators run behind. It is still something you would want to know before depositing, and it is the kind of thing that never appears on the operator’s own site.
A trap worth knowing about
Some licence validators return an invalid or not-found result for any bare domain queried without the operator’s own seal token. That is a quirk of how the validator is built, not evidence the operator is unlicensed, and it is easy to misread as a finding.
Before concluding anything from a negative result, test the validator against an operator you know is licensed. If that also comes back negative without a token, the tool is telling you nothing either way.
What a licence actually gets you
Less than the marketing implies, and more than nothing. A verified licence identifies who you are actually playing with, which matters enormously if you later need to pursue a complaint. Several offshore authorities also run a complaints process.
What offshore licences generally do not give you is deposit protection, an ombudsman with binding powers, or enforcement that resembles a UK or Malta regime. Read our jurisdiction pages for what each one specifically covers.
The same question, asked in 5 other markets
The same procedure written for the markets where the question is asked against a domestic regulator rather than an offshore one.