Five checks against a regulator's own record: the licence, the entity, withdrawal limits, the complaints route and what the site leaves out.
Five checks, each done against a regulator's own record rather than against anybody's opinion. They take about ten minutes the first time and two minutes after that.
None of them involve reading reviews, including ours.
The footer is text the operator typed. The register is the record.
Go to the regulator for the market you play from and search there. Malta publishes a licensee register and a URL checker, Britain a public register, Spain the Buscador de operadores, Denmark a list of licence holders, Germany a whitelist. Our regulator index has the links.
Search the URL if the register supports it. Otherwise take the company name from the terms and conditions and search that.
This is the check almost nobody does and it is the one that catches the most.
The company named in the site's terms and conditions should be the company holding the licence. A brand name that appears nowhere in the register is normal, because licences belong to companies. A licence held by a company that the site never names is not.
If the terms name no company at all, stop there. A licensed operator has no reason to hide its identity.
Specifically three numbers: the maximum withdrawal per month, the maximum per transaction, and any cap applied to winnings from bonus money.
A monthly cap turns a large win into a payment plan. It is in the terms you accept, so finding it afterwards is not a dispute, it is a thing you agreed to. Find it first.
A licensed operator has to publish how to complain, the timescales and the escalation route, and has to have arrangements for you to take a dispute to an alternative dispute resolution entity, free of charge.
So look for the named ADR entity in the terms. If there is a named entity and a published procedure, you have a remedy when something goes wrong. If there is neither, you do not, and that is the most useful single thing you can learn about a casino before depositing.
Three absences worth treating as findings.
No company name in the terms. No named ADR entity. No published withdrawal limits.
Any one of those is enough to walk away from, and none of them require you to judge anybody's honesty. They are things that are either on the page or not.
Whether you will enjoy it, whether the games are good value, or whether support is any use.
They tell you that there is an identifiable company, licensed in your market, with a published route to a free dispute resolution service. That is the floor. Everything above the floor is a separate question and most of this site is about those.
The register checks step by step: how to check an MGA licence yourself, how to check a DGOJ licence in Spain and how to check a Danish Spillemyndigheden licence. If something goes wrong, use a casino complaint email template.
| Check | Where you look | A fail looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Licence in the register | The regulator's own register | No record, or a status that is not current |
| 2. Entity matches the site | The site's terms, then the register | The terms name no company, or a different one |
| 3. Withdrawal limits | The terms, before depositing | Caps you only discover after winning |
| 4. Complaints and ADR | The terms and the help pages | No named ADR entity, no published procedure |
| 5. The absences | The whole site | Any of the above simply missing |
Only if it is live and resolves to the regulator's own domain. A flat image is decoration. Check the register directly rather than trusting the badge.
A licence is permission to offer gambling in the jurisdiction that granted it. For your question, the register that matters is your own market's.
For the question of whether an operator is licensed and identifiable, yes, because that is a matter of record you can check yourself in ten minutes. Reviews are for the questions records cannot answer.
The checks rely on regulators' own registers and UKGC complaints rules. How to apply them is general guidance. Last reviewed October 15, 2026.