One side of this comparison has no members

The comparison people ask for has an empty side

A reader wanting to weigh an offshore licence against an Australian one is asking a question with no second term. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 creates no domestic permission for online casino games, and state and territory licences cover sports betting, lotteries and land-based venues instead.

So the honest form of the question is different: what does a foreign permission give an Australian reader, given that no local one is available at any price?

Start with what a local licence would have done, because that is the yardstick. It would have put the operator inside Australian consumer law and inside an Australian dispute scheme. It would have attached conditions enforceable by an Australian body against an Australian entity. It would have connected the operator to the national self-exclusion register. And a court order about a balance would have been served on a company with something to lose in this country.

An offshore permit does none of those four things, and that is not a criticism of any particular authority. It is a statement about which jurisdiction's machinery a permission plugs into.

What a permit does give you

Three things, and they are worth more than nothing.

A named company. A register entry usually names the legal person that holds the permission, which is the entity a complaint or a claim would have to be aimed at. Vave's registration was reread on 2 September 2026 and returns OGL/2024/1676/0905, held by Latcas B.V., with the status Active and an issue date of 19 May 2025.

A jurisdiction. A permission is issued under somebody's rules, and those rules include a complaints route of some kind. It is a slower and more distant route than a domestic one and it exists.

And a checkable claim. A number can be searched in the register of the authority that issued it, which turns a badge in a footer into something a stranger with a browser can confirm or fail to confirm. That check is the single most useful thing a reader can do in five minutes, and it is the reason this site records a number and a register status rather than a logo.

A number is not a brand

The most common misreading of a licence number is that it belongs to the site displaying it.

It usually belongs to a company, and a company can run several sites. Across a wider reading of 100 operators’ own terms and register entries, 68 publish a licence number, and the number of distinct numbers among them is 53. Nine numbers cover 24 brands between them, because what is registered is the operator, not the shopfront.

Sixty-eight claims, fifty-three permissions.

For a reader that has a practical consequence. Two brands with different names, different colours and different welcome offers can be the same counterparty, and a dispute with one is a dispute with the company behind both. It also means a permission being revoked or lapsing can affect several sites at once, none of which will announce it.

The lesson is to read the holder's name in the register entry rather than the brand name on the page. Where the register names no holder, that is worth recording too, and this site records it as an unnamed holder rather than assuming the brand.

Three rows here were rewritten to match the register

A register reading dated 26 August 2026 returned entries for three operators on this table that did not match the cells beside them. On 4 September 2026 those three cells were changed to what the register says, and both halves are printed here, because a cell that has quietly become correct is indistinguishable from one that was correct all along.

Wild.io's cell read Curaçao, no number, disputed. The Curaçao certificate portal returns OGL/2024/210/0198 for the domain wild.io, granted on 14 April 2025, with Nonce Gaming B.V. named as the operator and the status Active; the cell now carries that number. The brand prints a different one on its own pages — ALSI-202504044-FI2, an Anjouan registration held by Stack Gaming Ltd — and that is a second permission rather than a contradiction of the first.

TrustDice's cell read 8048/JAZ, a reference in the older master-licence format. The register returns OGL/2024/664/0280 for the domain trustdice.win, granted on 16 July 2024, with Satoshi Gaming Group N.V. named as the operator and the status Active. The old reference is kept in the file as a previous number and no longer stands in the table as the current one.

BC.Game's cell read Anjouan with no number, which recorded neither of the two things the registers hold. The Curaçao entry for bc.game is OGL/2023/118/0060, granted on 4 March 2024 to Small House B.V., and the status it returned is Revoked. The Anjouan register, read the same day, returns ALSI-202410011-FI1 held by Twocent Technology Limited and valid to 1 October 2026. One authority reports the permission it issued as withdrawn while another reports one of its own as live, and neither settles the other.

Three cells changed, and the one that changed furthest changed against the operator.

Each was a difference between two readings taken at different times by different routes, and the rule applied here is that the register reading takes the cell while the previous value stays on the page. A cell that quietly moved to whichever version read better would be indistinguishable, to a reader, from a cell that had been checked. The rules that govern which figures enter the comparison at all are on the method page.

One row needs no reconciling. Betpanda.io is recorded as Costa Rica, unlicensed — and that is not a gap in the reading. Costa Rica issues no gambling licence: companies incorporate there and operate under ordinary company law, so there is no register to search and no permission to verify. A Costa Rican company is a company, and nothing more is being claimed.

What the permit does not decide

Whether an operator pays.

Every figure that decides what happens to a balance sits in the terms rather than in a register: the ceiling, the turnover requirement and the point at which documents are demanded. On this list one operator writes a weekly ceiling with a clause, and none publishes an amount below which verification will not be requested — which is why the comparison has no column for it, since a column that reads the same on all ten rows compares nothing.

A verified permit and an unpayable balance are perfectly compatible.

The reverse is also true, and worth saying to keep the check in proportion. An operator with no verifiable permission can pay every request within the hour. A register entry is evidence about a company's standing with an authority, not evidence about its cashier.

So the order of checks is: find the number, search it in the issuing authority's own register, note the holder's name, then go and read the three clauses that decide the money. The legal position of the reader themselves is separate again and is on the legal page, and what the regulator can actually do about any of this is on the ACMA page.

Read the terms before depositing. The restricted-countries clause on these operators has been confirmed for none of them.