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The short version: a licence is worth what its complaints process is worth. Judge one by three things: whether an independent body hears player disputes, whether that body publishes its decisions, and whether any operator has ever been sanctioned. A jurisdiction that fails all three is providing a logo for the footer. This applies to every licence, including the well-regarded ones.

Why Operators Moved

Curaçao licensed online gambling for over twenty years under a system built around master licences and sub-licences, which was cheap, fast and light on supervision. That structure has been under reform, with proposals requiring licensees to maintain a physical office on the island, employ key staff resident there, and engage certified mediators for unresolved player complaints.

Each of those is a real cost. An operator facing them has three options: absorb them, leave the market, or find a jurisdiction that does not impose them. Anjouan, in the Comoros, has absorbed a meaningful share of the third category, and a number of brands — including at least one that left Curaçao during a bankruptcy — now hold licences there.

None of this is hidden or unlawful. Jurisdictional competition is how the industry has always worked, and operators are explicit about it: the company in the case above publicly cited an "increasingly hostile environment for operators" as its reason for leaving.

Four Jurisdictions, Compared on What Matters

Comparisons of licences usually list fees and tax rates, which are of no interest to a player. What matters is what happens when something goes wrong.

QuestionGreat BritainMaltaCuraçaoAnjouan
Independent dispute body for playersYes, mandated ADRYesMediation proposed under reformNot established
Enforcement decisions publishedRoutinelyYesRegister onlyNot visible
RTP disclosure obligationYesPartialNoNo
Deposit protectionSegregation rules, not a guaranteePartialNoNo

The last row deserves emphasis because it is the one players most often assume differently: no jurisdiction on that table guarantees your deposit. The best of them require operator funds to be held separately from player funds, which improves your position in an insolvency without making you safe.

Three Questions That Test Any Licence

1
Where do I complain, and is it independent of the operator? Find the named body. If the escalation path ends at the operator's own support desk, there is no external process, whatever the licence page says.
2
Has it published any decisions? A regulator that has never publicly ruled against a licensee has either an exceptional set of licensees or no enforcement practice. Published decisions are the only evidence available to you from outside.
3
Does the register show the entity, and does the entity match? Look up the licence on the regulator's own site, not the operator's footer, and compare the company name against the one in the terms and conditions. A mismatch is the single most informative thing you can find in five minutes.

Licence information is almost always presented as a seal in the footer, which is the weakest possible format: an image, controlled by the operator, that looks the same whether the licence is current, expired, or held by a different company.

The seal is not the licence. The register entry is. Checking it takes under a minute and is the only step in this article that cannot be faked from the operator's side.

What a good result looks like: the regulator's register returns an active licence, held by a company whose name matches the one in the terms and conditions, in a jurisdiction with a named independent complaints body that has published decisions. That combination is uncommon, and it is worth more than any review score.

The Dispute Over Whether the Licence Exists

Everything above treats Anjouan as a lighter-touch jurisdiction. That framing is too generous, because it assumes the licence is a licence. The central bank of the country concerned has said otherwise.

The Banque Centrale des Comores has stated that the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority and related entities have no physical or legal existence in the country, and in a 2023 statement described several Anjouan regulators, and the firms selling their licences, as “fictitious structures”. The position rests on national banking laws passed in 2013 and 2015, after Anjouan rejoined the Comoros, which the bank says ended the authority those bodies claim. In early January 2026 Comorian officials repeated the warning to the gambling industry directly.

Anjouan Gaming rejects this and maintains publicly that its licences are valid under Comorian law. The disagreement is not settled, and this article does not settle it.

What it does change is the weight of the three questions above. If the body that issued a licence is one whose legal standing is disputed by the central bank of the country named on it, then “where do I complain” has no dependable answer — not because the process is weak, but because it may have no legal foundation to rest on. That is a different problem from a lax regulator, and a worse one.

What We Can and Cannot Say

What is solid: Curaçao has been tightening its requirements; some operators have relicensed in jurisdictions with lighter ones, Anjouan prominent among them; and the practical protections available to players differ sharply between jurisdictions on the criteria above.

What we are not claiming: that any particular Anjouan-licensed operator has treated players badly, or that the jurisdiction's regulator does not act. We have not submitted test complaints, and absence of published decisions is evidence of absence of publication rather than proof of absence of enforcement. That distinction matters, and blurring it would be exactly the kind of assertion this site criticises elsewhere.

The recommendation that follows is narrow. Judge a licence by its complaints process rather than by the flag on the seal, check the register rather than the footer, and keep the balance small enough that the answer does not matter much — which remains the only protection that works in every jurisdiction.

Reality check: even the strongest licence on that table does not make the games cheaper. A British-licensed operator running 92% slot builds costs you more per hour than a lightly regulated one running 96%. Licensing is about what happens when something goes wrong; the four checks are about what happens when everything goes normally, which is most of the time.

Sources

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