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How we check

Last reviewed 6 August 2026Marisol Trejo

Every page on this site answers the same question in the same order, and the order is the method. There are four steps. None of them needs an account, all of them can be repeated by a reader with a browser, and where a step cannot be completed we say so on the page rather than filling the gap with an assumption.

1. The company, not the brand

The footer of a casino names an operating company, usually with a registration number and an address. That company is what we look up, because a brand can move between companies without the front page changing a pixel. Where the footer names no company at all, that is the finding, and the page says so in the first paragraph rather than the last.

2. The licence, in the register that issued it

A licence number is checked in the register of the body that supposedly granted it, matched by company name. In practice a site reaching a Canadian player carries one of a small set: registration with the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario plus an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario; a provincial lottery corporation running the site itself; or an offshore licence, most often Curacao or Malta.

3. The province the reader is in

This is the step other guides skip, and it is the one that decides what the licence is worth. Canada regulates gambling province by province: Ontario has opened a licensed private market, while most other provinces run a single provincial offer and treat everything else as outside their system. The same operator can therefore be a regulated business for one reader and an offshore site for another, on the same day, with the same licence.

So a page here does not say "this operator is licensed" and stop. It says which body, and which provinces that body covers.

4. What breaks if something goes wrong

The practical end of the exercise: if a withdrawal is refused or an account is closed with a balance in it, who does the player complain to, and does that body have any power over this operator. A provincial regulator has a defined process. An offshore licensor is a company in another jurisdiction with no duty to a Canadian player at all.

What we do not publish

• No scores, no stars, no "top 10". The finding is where the operator is rooted, not a number.
• No player testimonials we cannot verify, and no review widget.
• No payout times or figures we did not see ourselves. Where a claim comes from an operator, the sentence says so.
• No page about an operator we could not reach from Canada at the time of checking.

Re-checking, and corrections

Provincial rules are in motion, so every page carries the date it was last checked, and pages that name a province or an operator are re-checked at least every six months, sooner when a regulator announces something. When we get it wrong the page is corrected and keeps a dated line saying what changed. A correction that changes the outcome goes at the top of the page, not the bottom. Send one to the desk and you will get an answer either way.

Who runs the checks, and how the site pays for itself: the author page and about us.