Original data · snapshot 2026-09-06

The crypto casino licence audit

Every crypto casino claims to be licensed. We read the fine print of the 34 operators HotPayout tracks, from the primary source: the live footer and terms of each site. The result: 6 publish no licence at all, 6 publish a claim we could not verify or that contradicts other sources, and only 1 has been confirmed on a regulator’s live portal. When the audit caught operators we ourselves monetised, we delisted them. That record is below too.

1. “Licensed” and “verifiable” are different claims

Most review sites repeat the licence line from a casino’s footer. We classify every operator on a five-step ladder instead: verified on the regulator (the licence number checked against a live official portal), confirmed in operator terms (read directly from the operator’s own legal text, but with no regulator portal to check against), published (a licence number is shown, nobody can independently confirm it), unverified claim (the claim is missing a number, third-party sourced, or contradicted by another source), and none found. Only the first step is proof. Of 34 operators, 21 sit in the middle of the ladder: a published claim that no public register can confirm.

2. What the fine print actually said

Reading primary sources beats repeating footers. Three findings from this audit cycle:

• A company ID standing in for a licence. One operator’s terms cite only a Costa Rica corporate registration where a licence would belong. Costa Rica has no gambling regulator and issues no gambling licence at all: what operators hold there is a company registration plus a municipal data-processing permit, and neither one reviews or supervises gambling conduct. So there is no authority to appeal to and no register to check. We delisted the operator (it was a monetised partner at the time).
• Terms that assume a regulator, then never name one. Another operator publishes no authority, no licence number and no licensed operating company anywhere on its homepage or either of its footer legal pages. Its own terms nonetheless send dormant player balances to “the licensing authority” and route complaints to “an authorised gambling authority or a licensee”, without identifying any of them. The site even ships styled typography for a footer licence line, and then prints no licence line. Seven of our own active campaigns on that operator were deactivated the day the read was confirmed.
• Third parties inventing licences. One operator is described by an aggregator as holding a Malta MGA licence. Its own site claims Anjouan with no licence number published. Nobody in that chain has shown a verifiable document, and we label the entry accordingly.

3. We delist what fails, including our own partners

An audit that never costs the auditor money is marketing. Ours has teeth: when an operator we monetise fails licence verification, the campaigns are deactivated and the operator moves to a non-linking delisted state. The record so far:

4. The licence map, operator by operator

Verification status is our reading of the operator’s published licence claim against primary sources, re-checked weekly; it is not legal advice and it changes as operators update terms. “Affiliate partner” means we may earn a commission from that operator, which is exactly why the delisted rows are the ones to look at: those are partners the audit removed. 23 of 34 tracked operators are currently monetised.

Methodology

Licence text is read from each operator’s live footer and terms with a scraping pipeline (most gambling sites block plain HTTP fetchers, so a real browser-grade read is required), then checked against the issuing regulator’s live portal where one exists and against independent complaint databases otherwise. Statuses are re-checked on a weekly cadence by an automated audit loop, and every change lands in the table above. Figures on this page are computed live from the same per-operator records that power our payout board. See how we rank.

Open data (CC BY 4.0): reuse these figures with a link back to this page. Machine-readable feed: /data.json. Journalists & researchers: happy to provide the underlying licence reads and dates per operator.

Related: the withdrawal reality report · the on-chain payout observatory · the full payout board.

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