What a licence number proves, and why in Japan it substitutes for nothing

68 publish a number, and there are only 53

Of the 100 operators in the record, 68 have a licence number filled in. Count the numbers themselves, though, and there are only 53.

The gap of 15 is numbers being shared.

Nine numbers cover more than one site, and 24 brands sit on those nine between them. What gets registered is a company, not the brand name on the screen. One company running three sites under three names produces one number and three sites. Counted from the company side, 52 company names collapse into 43 companies.

The remaining 32 publish no number. For another 32, no issuer name is in the record either. That is “we could not read it”, not “they do not have one”, and nothing further can be said.

The issuers cluster into two

Count the records where an issuer is named and it comes out at 37 for the Curaçao Gaming Authority and 25 for the Anjouan Gaming Board. Six carry some other wording, and for 32 there is no name in the record at all.

So of the 68 whose issuer could be read, nine in ten sit with those two bodies.

The ten in our table have the same shape: six Curaçao, four Anjouan. Not one Japanese issuer appears, because Japan operates no issuing mechanism aimed at online casinos. That is not a choice any operator made.

The registered statuses are uneven too. Across the 100: Active for 32, valid for 25, revoked for 5, and no status in the record for 38. Among the ten in the table: Active for five, valid for three, and no status for two.

The one question a number answers

There is one question a number can answer. Does the body that issued it still hold that registration?

Nothing else.

It does not answer how many days a withdrawal takes. It does not answer whether the terms are fair. It does not answer whether Japanese readers are accepted — that last one lives in a different document of the operator's, the barred-country list, and we could read only 38 of those.

A number and a country list can also disagree. Three of five brands running on one number naming Japan while the other two do not is a shape that actually occurs in the record. The number speaks about the company and the list speaks about that brand's terms, so the two do not contradict each other. For a reader, though, it means two answers sitting side by side.

Pulling a number yourself

Both registers open without an account.

The Curaçao Gaming Authority's is at cert.cga.cw. Look at what the register says, not at the number printed on the operator's own site. The Anjouan Gaming Board's sits in the public register at anjouangaming.com.

Three things are worth looking at: whether the number exists at all, whether the company named on the entry matches the company the operator says it is, and whether the status is still valid.

For the ten in the table, eight numbers reached the issuer's register. For the other two, Rocketpot and Wolf.bet, the licence link points at the operator's own site. The number is written down, and what backs it is the same operator. That does not mean the number is false. It means that for those two, the route by which a reader confirms it against a third party is not open.

The year in the number is not the year they opened

Curaçao numbers carry a year in the second segment. Read that as the year the operator opened and you will usually be wrong.

The year is the year of registration.

It is visible in our own table. Bitsler has run since 2015 and carries a number in the 2024 form. Wild.io has run since 2022 and also carries a 2024 form. When a register switches to a new format, companies that were already running receive numbers in the new format.

For what it is worth, the year of opening is in the record for only 11 of the 100 — which is why this site does not make an operator's age a column in the table.

The number can change while the document stays the same

What a reader actually runs into is this. Registration does not go through under one name, so they move to a site with a different name. It looks different and the number is different.

The document can still be the same one.

Of the five operators that publish an identity-check figure, three share both the amount and the clause number. Bitcasino.io and Livecasino.io run on the same company and the same number; Sportsbet.io has a different number but carries the same wording at the same clause. Three rows in a table, one piece of text in the documents. They are set side by side on the identity-check page.

Revocation does not erase the number

Five of the 100 have a registered status of revoked: BC.Game, Bets.io, Betriot, Casinoly and Zet Casino.

Three of them publish the same number, OGL/2023/103/0067.

One registration covered three sites, and that registration lost effect. The three addresses still display the number. What is printed on a site is the operator's account of itself; what stands in the register is the account given by the body that issued the number. When the two disagree, the second one governs.

None of those five appears in our table: an operator with a revoked entry is not listed. The detail is on the revocation page. How the other columns were filled in is set out in how we read the terms.

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