The Sequence, With Dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 2024 | Small House B.V. states in court filings that it acquired BC.Game from Blockdance B.V. — a deal it says excluded liabilities from prior operations. |
| 12 November 2024 | The Joint Court of Justice of Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the BES Islands declares Small House bankrupt, on claims brought by a foundation representing online gaming claimants. Player claims presented to the court exceeded 2.1 million dollars. |
| 5 December 2024 | BC.Game withdraws its Curaçao licence, one day before the regulator was due to decide on it — the Curaçao Gaming Control Board had scheduled its announcement for 6 December — citing an "increasingly hostile environment for operators". |
| Following months | The brand operates under a licence issued by Anjouan, in the Comoros, held by a company incorporated in Belize. |
| September 2025 | The Curaçao regulator removes Small House B.V. from its public list of cancelled licences, alongside another operator. |
Read as a sequence, the notable feature is the ordering. The licence was surrendered before it could be revoked. The legal difference between those two outcomes is considerable — a withdrawal is a commercial decision that leaves no adverse finding on a register, while a revocation is a regulatory sanction that follows the company.
Who Owes the Balance
This is the part that matters to anyone with money in an account, and it is a question of company law rather than gambling regulation.
The position argued in court was that the acquiring company took the business but not the liabilities of prior operations — so player claims arising before the transfer were not its responsibility. Claimants argued the opposite: that the business continued without interruption and the obligations travelled with it. Proceedings over those claims have continued.
Note what a gambling licence does not do here. It licenses an activity in a territory. It does not create a deposit guarantee, it does not rank you as a creditor, and it does not survive the transfer of a business between corporate entities. When the question became "which company owes this balance", the licence was not the document that answered it.
This is not specific to one operator. No online gambling jurisdiction operates a deposit protection scheme comparable to bank deposit insurance. A player balance is an unsecured claim on a company, and it behaves like one when that company fails — a point covered more generally in what happens to casinos built on crypto.
What Changing Jurisdiction Changes
An operator that moves from one licensing territory to another changes, in one step, the regulator you can complain to, the rules the operator must follow, and the practical prospect of any complaint being enforced.
Curaçao has been reforming: proposals under its updated gaming ordinance would require licensees to maintain a physical office on the island, employ resident key staff, and work with certified mediators on unresolved player complaints. Those are meaningful obligations, and they are precisely the kind of obligation an operator avoids by licensing elsewhere.
For a player the practical test is not which flag appears in the footer but three questions that follow from it: is there a named complaints body, is it independent of the operator, and has it published decisions against licensees? A licence that fails all three is a logo.
The Register Entry That Disappeared
In September 2025 the Curaçao regulator removed the parent company from its published list of cancelled licences. No detailed public explanation accompanied the change, and industry reporting at the time treated it as unexplained.
Whatever the administrative reason, the effect is worth naming: a public register is useful to players only to the extent that it is a durable record. An entry that can be removed without a published rationale provides a weaker signal than its existence implies — and for anyone checking an operator's history, the register is usually the only source available.
The practical takeaway. Check a licence at the regulator's own register rather than from the operator's footer, note the licensing entity name rather than the brand, and remember that the brand can be transferred between entities while the name on the website stays the same. The entity is the thing that owes you money.
What This Article Does Not Claim
It does not allege fraud. Bankruptcy is a legal process with lawful outcomes, withdrawing a licence is lawful, relicensing in another jurisdiction is lawful, and a court has not made findings beyond those reported above. Disputes over who owed what have been contested by the parties, and this article does not adjudicate them.
It also does not audit the games. We have not connected to the operator's servers or examined the configurations served to players, and we are not asserting anything about the returns offered. As with the RTP band question, that is work we would want to do properly before publishing conclusions, with the method and the raw results published alongside.
What the record does establish is narrower and still worth knowing: a licence can be exchanged for another in weeks, the exchange leaves a lighter trace than a revocation, the entity that owes a balance can change hands separately from the brand, and the register recording all of it can be edited. Those four facts are the honest answer to what "licensed" guarantees.
Reality check: the practical protection available to a player is small and mostly self-administered — keep balances low, withdraw regularly rather than accumulating, and treat any balance at any operator as money you have lent to a company rather than money you hold. Testing the withdrawal before you need it is the cheapest check available.
What BC.Game Said
The company rejected the ruling publicly, described the judgment as erroneous and said it would appeal. That position belongs in the record alongside the ruling itself: a first-instance bankruptcy declaration is not a final finding, and BC.Game has never accepted it.
The sequel points the same way. In August 2025 industry reporting indicated the bankruptcy was likely to be reversed, and the removal of Small House B.V. from the Curaçao register was read by several outlets as preparation for a return to the jurisdiction. Nothing above says the operator was proven to owe the claimed balances — only that the claims were brought, the court ruled, the licence was surrendered a day before the regulator was due to decide, and the brand continued under another flag throughout.
Sources
- NEXT.io, BC.Game declared bankrupt amid disputed payment obligation claims (November 2024)
- NEXT.io, BC.Game withdraws Curaçao gaming licence ahead of regulator's ruling (December 2024)
- Gaming Intelligence, BC.Game quits Curaçao after bankruptcy ruling (2024)
- iGaming Business, BC.Game withdraws licence from “increasingly hostile” Curaçao market (2024)
- LCB, BC.Game disputes bankruptcy ruling, pledges appeal — the operator's own position
- NEXT.io, Curaçao regulator strikes BC.Game licence revocation from register (2025)
- Gambling Insider, BC.Game withdraws Curaçao licence in compliance move (December 2024)
- Bonus.com, BC.Game surrenders Curaçao licence, regulated by Anjouan (2025)
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