Anjouan Casino Licence UK: What the Offshore Authorisation Actually Buys You

Updated September 2026

Licensed

Available in GB

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18+ Only

A licence printed on an island most readers have never heard of is, for a UK player, almost a non-event. The site accepts your deposit, the games load, the cashier works — and at the first sign of trouble there is no Commission complaints route, no mandatory GAMSTOP, no stake cap to keep the night from running away. That is the shape of the choice, and reading the rest of this page is mostly about understanding it.

Data current as of 23 September 2026, cross-checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register of gambling businesses (CSV download, 18 September 2026).

Responsible Gaming: The Real Cost Lives Here

The single sharpest difference between an Anjouan-licensed site and a Gambling Commission licensee is what each has to do for the person sitting at the keyboard. The Commission’s licence comes attached to a stack of obligations written into the Gambling Act 2005 and the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP). An Anjouan licence comes with its own conditions, drawn up by an authority whose parent body was set up to license offshore finance rather than remote gambling. The two stacks do not overlap, and the things the British one forces — the things a player is most likely to need at some point — are the very things the Anjouan stack does not require.

GAMSTOP is the clearest example. Every GB-licensed online operator has, since 31 March 2020, been obliged to honour a national self-exclusion register: a player who signs up for six months, one year or five years is blocked across every participating site for the whole period, and that period cannot be cut short. An Anjouan-licensed site is not on the register, has no obligation to integrate with it, and is under no instruction to check whether a freshly opened account belongs to someone who has just excluded themselves. The mechanism a player relies on to keep themselves out when they have asked to be kept out does not extend to offshore-licensed brands. Where this is the line that matters — for anyone who has ever tried to enforce a break on themselves — it is the wrong line to be on.

Stake and wagering caps carry the same shape. Online slots at a GB-licensed casino now have a maximum stake per game cycle of £5 for players aged 25 and over (from 9 April 2025) and £2 for 18-24 (from 21 May 2025). A wagering requirement on any bonus is capped at 10x from 19 December 2025, and mixed-product bonuses — bet on sport, get free casino spins — are banned outright. None of that is binding on an Anjouan-licensed site, because none of it is enforced through the Anjouan regime. The site can set its own stake ceiling, its own wagering factor, its own mix-and-bundle rules, and a UK player has none of the Commission’s protections when the rules cut against them.

Identity verification follows the same pattern. Since 7 May 2019 a GB-licensed operator must verify name, address and date of birth before the first deposit or any play. The check is not optional and is part of the LCCP. An Anjouan-licensed site runs on the conditions its own licence sets, and a player who values being able to deposit without sending documents has picked the wrong reason if that is why they chose it: the GB side has tightened further, not loosened, and the offshore side has no equivalent obligation to follow suit. A player who wants to play with fewer documents has, in practice, also chosen to play without GAMSTOP, without the £2/£5 stake ceiling, without the 10x wagering cap, and without the Commission’s dispute route. Those are a single package, not a menu.

GAMSTOP’s enforcement mechanism is the practical reason the difference matters. A self-excluded player opening an Anjouan-licensed account is not being foiled by anything. The site has no signal to check and no duty to check it. The protection is not delayed or watered down; it is absent.

There is no maximum deposit or loss ceiling set by the Commission for the player themselves — that is not what the regulation does. What it does is require operators to prompt a customer to set a financial limit before the first deposit (from 31 October 2025) and to run a financial vulnerability check at £150 net deposits in a rolling 30 days (from 28 February 2025), drawing on public data only. Wider financial risk assessments are announced but not yet in force. An Anjouan-licensed site owes a player none of these steps, and is under no instruction to build them. A player reading the small print for that kind of safeguard on an offshore site will not find it, because it is not required to be there.

GB-Licensed Sites Against the Anjouan Baseline

If the responsible-gaming shelf sets the shape of the choice, the comparison shelf puts a face to the alternative. Every site named below is taken from the Gambling Commission’s public register, listed against the licence account that runs it, and carries the Commission’s remote casino operating licence that is the only authorisation on which a UK player can lawfully place a deposit. None of these is recommended. They are the alternatives the register actually holds.

Midnite, the tenth slot, sits outside the table because its licence number is published on the Commission’s register but the register’s domain column does not list Midnite.com in the snapshot the research file records. The licence itself is 042647-R-321653-022, held by Dribble Media Limited (account 42647). The omission is in the table, not in the licence: what makes the brand a GB-licensed operator is the licence, and the licence is active.

The split between the table’s status columns is not cosmetic. An active domain is one the Commission has recorded as operated directly by the licence holder; a white-label site — Virgin Games is the only one in this set — trades under another company’s licence. The player at a white-label domain is dealt with by the licence-holder on the register, which is the same legal entity the Commission regulates, but the brand on the homepage is not the name on the licence. The distinction matters because a player who has a complaint names the licence holder in correspondence with the Commission, not the brand they signed up with.

The remote casino licence number itself follows a fixed shape, and recognising it saves a player from being talked past. The format is account-R-number-suffix: the leading six digits repeat the licence holder’s account number and the “R” marks a remote (online) licence. PPB Games Limited, for example, sits at account 39411 and its remote casino operating licence number begins with 039411. The number after the R is unique to the licence; the trailing suffix counts reissues. None of this proves a site is safe, but it proves a site is what its footer says it is — and that is the only place the comparison starts from.

What the table does not show is where each brand sits on the other axis that matters here: the protections research pins to a GB licence but cannot pin to a single operator. GAMSTOP participation is mandatory for every online licence, so every brand above is on the register. The £2/£5 stake cap applies to every slot product, so every brand is bound by it. The 10x wagering cap binds every welcome package and reload promotion. Where the brands differ is in how those rules are wrapped — reality-check intervals, time-out defaults, deposit-limit prompts — and those differences are not in the public register and not in this table.

What the Numbers Behind the Comparison Look Like

Two register snapshots anchor the whole set. On 18 September 2026 the Gambling Commission’s public register listed 139 businesses holding an active remote casino operating licence, and the register’s domain list held 1065 active and 361 white-label domain entries. A white-label site is one that trades under another company’s licence — a brand name without its own operating licence, hosted on someone else’s. The 139 figure is the population of licence holders; the 1065+361 figure is the population of sites those licence holders actually run. The relationship is not one-to-one. Several licence holders run dozens of domains, and the brands a player sees named in marketing are a small fraction of what the register records.

The register is downloadable in full as CSV or Excel, and that is the only test of a licence claim that holds up. A footer that prints a licence number is a starting point, not a verdict. The verdict is the row in the register that ties that number to an active domain, and the search box on the Commission’s website is the place to do it.

Why a Licence Held Elsewhere Is Not a Substitute

Several large GB-facing brands sit on the register under holding companies based outside the UK — Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, Malta — and that is unremarkable. The Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 brought every operator taking GB customers into the Commission’s regime regardless of where the operator is based, and the offshore holding company is irrelevant to whether the brand is lawfully allowed to take a deposit. What matters is the licence on the register. The Anjouan licence is different in kind, not in geography: the Commission does not list Anjouan-licensed operators at all, because an Anjouan licence does not authorise activity with GB customers. A site that runs on an Anjouan licence alone is operating outside the GB regime, and the GB regime is the only regime that lets an operator lawfully take a GB deposit.

The Brands, One by One

Paddy Power runs on PPB Games Limited’s licence (039411-R-319335-010), with Paddy Power listed on the register as an active domain. The brand carries the full weight of the Commission’s regime: GAMSTOP participation, stake and wagering caps, identity verification before the first deposit, the published complaints route to an approved ADR. The trade-off is the Commission’s other rules — those caps and that identity check — which are a feature to one player and an obstacle to another.

Unibet sits at Platinum Gaming Limited, licence 045322-R-324275-019, with unibet.co.uk active on the register. The .co.uk domain is the kind of detail that quietly tells the reader where the operator expects its customers to be, and the licence behind it is the kind that takes the question off the table.

Sky Vegas — Bonne Terre Gaming Limited, 065519-R-339675-002, Sky Vegas active on the register — is the slots-led brand of the same Sky ecosystem that runs Sky Bet. The licence is the line of work the brand sits inside, and the slot-specific protections on a Commission licence apply to it in full.

kwiff is the smallest brand in this set by reputation, but on the register it sits on the same footing as the rest: Eaton Gate Gaming Limited, 044448-R-323408-017, Kwiff.com active. The licence does the same job. The brand’s marketing style is its own, and the regulation it sits under is the Commission’s.

bet365 is the heaviest hitter in the set by volume — Hillside (UK Gaming) ENC, 055149-R-331499-004, Bet365.com active — and what the licence number says is the same as what it says for every other brand on the register: this is the entity the Commission regulates, the entity a player complains to the Commission about, and the entity bound by every protection the regime sets.

MrQ is Tek Fox Ltd (060629-R-337532-004), with Mrq.com active. The brand’s reputation for no-wagering bonuses does not change the licence underneath; it changes the offer on top of it. The 10x wagering cap that binds every GB-licensed operator’s bonus binds this one too.

Midnite — Dribble Media Limited, 042647-R-321653-022 — is the tenth operator in the set, and the one the table omits because Midnite.com does not appear in the snapshot’s domain column. The licence is active and the operator is GB-licensed; the gap is in the register, not in the brand’s standing.

Virgin Games is the only white-label site in the table. Gamesys Operations Limited, 038905-R-319430-022, holds the licence; Virgin Games is listed as a white-label domain. The player at Virgin Games is a Gamesys customer for regulatory purposes, and a complaint that goes to the Commission is filed against Gamesys, not against the brand on the homepage.

BetVictor — BV Gaming Limited, 039576-R-319370-028, Betvictor.com active — sits on the same regulatory footing as the rest. The brand’s longer history does not change the regime it sits under.

Grosvenor Casinos closes the set: Rank Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited, 057924-R-334666-005, Grosvenor Casinos active. The Gibraltar holding company is unremarkable under the post-2014 regime — what makes the brand GB-licensed is the licence on the register, not the corporate address on file.

The Common Thread

The nine lines of the table look like nine separate brands and they are nine separate brands. They are also, on the question this page is built around, the same answer. Every one of them runs on a Commission licence, sits on GAMSTOP, honours the £2/£5 stake cap, honours the 10x wagering cap, and answers to the Commission when something goes wrong. The comparison the table is built to support is not brand against brand; it is GB-licensed operator against Anjouan-licensed operator, and on that axis the brands are a single point. A player choosing between any two of them is choosing between two flavours of the same regime, not between two regimes.

What an Anjouan Licence Is, and How the Regime Got Here

The shelf this page started from is the responsible-gaming one, because that is where the choice is felt. The shelf that explains why the responsible-gaming shelf matters is the legality one, and the legality shelf starts with what an Anjouan licence actually is.

Anjouan is the easternmost island of the Comoros archipelago in the south-western Indian Ocean, an autonomous island within the Union of the Comoros with its capital at Mutsamudu. The Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority was established in 2002 to promote the island as an offshore financial centre and tax haven. The gaming side is layered on top: Anjouan Gaming, styled the “Internet Gaming Regulatory Authority”, operates under that finance authority and issues separate B2C and B2B internet gaming licences. The architecture is the giveaway — a finance authority running a gaming licence programme, with a separate entity issuing the licence on its behalf.

The Central Bank of Comoros stated in 2014 that no licence had been delivered for offshore financial activities on Anjouan and that it does not recognise licences issued by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority. That statement is fourteen years old as of this page’s snapshot, but it remains the cleanest single-line summary of how the authority that issues Anjouan gaming licences is treated by the central bank of the country it sits inside. GIABA’s May 2024 mutual evaluation report on the Union of the Comoros, based on an on-site visit in July 2023, records that gambling is prohibited under the Comorian Penal Code. An offshore gaming licence issued from Anjouan is, in the country that owns Anjouan, both unrecognised by the central bank and operating in a domain the penal code treats as prohibited. A reader who wants to know what the licence is worth in its own jurisdiction now has the answer.

The British Side of the Same Story

The Gambling Act 2005, which received royal assent on 7 April 2005, established the Gambling Commission as the regulator for Great Britain and set objectives of preventing crime, ensuring fairness, and protecting children and vulnerable people. The Act covers Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales — and does not cover Northern Ireland, which sits under separate legislation.

Before the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, operators licensed in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, or “white-listed” jurisdictions such as Alderney, the Isle of Man, Tasmania and Antigua and Barbuda could serve Great Britain customers without a Gambling Commission licence. The 2014 Act changed that. It came into force on 1 December 2014 and requires any remote gambling operator transacting with or advertising to consumers in Great Britain to hold a Gambling Commission operating licence, regardless of where the operator is based, and to pay 15% point-of-consumption tax on gross gambling yield from GB customers.

The mechanism is what closes the door on offshore substitutes. Under the 2014 Act’s point-of-consumption regime, it is a criminal offence to provide or advertise remote gambling facilities to Great Britain consumers without a Gambling Commission licence, regardless of any licence — such as one from Anjouan — that the operator holds elsewhere. Anjouan is not on the white list; it was not on the white list before 2014; and after 2014 the white list does not function in the way it used to. A Gambling Commission licence is the only authorisation that authorises serving a GB customer, and a foreign licence — Anjouan, Curaçao, Malta, Gibraltar — is not a substitute. The Commission’s own disruption work (cease-and-desist notices, search-engine delisting, payment and hosting referrals) is the practical arm of that regime; the Commission has no ISP-blocking power, which is why unlicensed sites still appear and still take deposits from players who find them.

What the Commission Does About a Site It Has Not Licensed

The Commission’s tools are listed in its own published practice. They include cease-and-desist notices to the operator and to payment and hosting intermediaries, search-engine delisting requests, and referrals to payment processors and the police where the activity crosses into criminal law. None of these requires a player to be refunded, none of these compels a withdrawal, and none of these puts the player back where they were before they deposited. The disruption work protects future players; it does not unwind losses that have already happened. A player who has deposited at an unlicensed site and not withdrawn is not made whole by the Commission’s later enforcement action.

There is no penalty aimed at the player. Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 criminalises the provider, not the customer. What the player loses on an unlicensed site is protection: no GAMSTOP, no Commission complaints route, no approved ADR. That is the frame for the rest of this page, and the legality shelf ends there.

The Wagering-Turnover Band: What a Bonus Costs on the New Cap

From 19 December 2025 the Commission caps wagering requirements on bonuses at 10x. The cap is a ceiling, not a floor, and a 10x offer is the worst a GB-licensed site can run. To see what that ceiling means for a player clearing a bonus, take a bonus of £50. Required turnover is bonus × wagering factor, or £50 × 10 = £500. At a slot stake of £1 per spin, that is 500 spins; at 2.5 seconds per spin (the Commission also sets a minimum spin interval) that is 1,250 seconds, or about 21 minutes of play. The arithmetic is mechanical and the inputs are the inputs: £500 must be wagered, the wagering must happen on games that count, and the time is the time it takes at the speed the regulator allows.

What the calculation produces is a band rather than a single figure, because the inputs that matter are not all in the formula. A £50 bonus at £1/spin clears in 21 minutes; a £200 bonus at the same stake, clearing under the same 10x cap, takes £2,000 of wagered play and 83 minutes. The same percentage at a higher stake — £5/spin, the maximum for a player aged 25 and over — clears 100 spins in about four minutes. The cap is fixed at 10x, and what the cap produces depends on the size of the bonus and the stake the player chooses. The 10x ceiling has eliminated the worst offenders but it has not flattened the time cost, because the time cost was never the wagering factor’s product alone.

The interesting figure sits two places over. Required turnover × (1 − RTP) is the expected loss on the bonus’s playthrough at a typical slot RTP. A £50 bonus at 10x wagering is £500 of wagered play; at a 96% RTP the expected loss on that £500 is about £20. The £50 bonus has a real cost of about £20 to clear, before any payout, before any luck. That is the figure a reader actually wants: not how long the bonus takes to clear but what the bonus costs in expectation. The wagering cap bounds the cost from above. Where the offer sits well below the cap, the cost is lower; where the offer sits at the cap, the cost is the cost.

A band, then, because the calculation is bound by the player’s stake and the bonus size. At £1/spin and a £50 bonus, 21 minutes of play and an expected loss around £20. At £5/spin and a £200 bonus, 17 minutes of play and an expected loss around £80. The cap is the same; the cost moves with the offer.

Reading the Register, and Recognising What the Licence Number Means

A licence number on a casino’s footer is only the start of the check, and the check is mechanical. The remote casino licence number on the register has the form account-R-number-suffix, where the leading six digits repeat the licence holder’s account number and the “R” marks a remote (online) licence. PPB Games Limited, the licence-holder behind Paddy Power, sits at account 39411, and the remote casino operating licence number begins with 039411. The number after the R is unique to the licence; the trailing suffix counts reissues. The structure is regular, and the regularity is the test: a number that does not parse this way is not a Commission licence number, and the register is the place that confirms it.

The register can be searched online and downloaded in full as CSV or Excel. The CSV is the canonical snapshot — what the Commission publishes, when it publishes, with the dates attached. A player with a doubt about a brand’s licence status can resolve it in minutes by typing the licence number into the search box. The same exercise on an Anjouan licence number returns nothing, because the Commission does not list Anjouan-licensed operators, and that absence is the answer. Anjouan is not a question the register answers; it is a question the register refuses to be asked.

What the Register Does Not Prove

A licence on the register proves the brand is lawfully allowed to take a GB deposit. It does not prove the brand is honest, generous, or solvent; it does not prove the bonus terms are fair; it does not prove the slot RTPs are as advertised. It proves the Commission can be complained to and can act if a player is mistreated. The Commission’s enforcement record is mixed, the ADR process is imperfect, and the protection is real without being absolute. A player who treats the licence as a guarantee is treating it as something it is not. A player who treats it as the entry ticket — the floor of the protections on offer — is reading it correctly.

The white-label flag in the register is worth pausing on. Virgin Games sits at licence 038905-R-319430-022, held by Gamesys Operations Limited, with Virgin Games listed as a white-label domain. A white-label site trades under another company’s licence: the brand on the homepage is not the name on the licence. A player who has a complaint names the licence holder in correspondence with the Commission, and the licence holder is Gamesys, not the brand. The brand is the marketing wrapper; the licence holder is the regulated entity. The two are not always the same company, and a player who wants the protection the licence offers needs to know which company holds it.

Limits, Auto-Play, and Other Rules a GB Licence Brings

Online slots at a GB-licensed casino carry a maximum stake per game cycle — £5 for players aged 25 and over (from 9 April 2025) and £2 for 18-24 (from 21 May 2025). There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling; operators must prompt a customer to set a financial limit before the first deposit (from 31 October 2025). Since 31 October 2021 auto-play is banned, a slot spin may not be faster than 2.5 seconds, and losses disguised as wins are banned. The minimum age is 18. Name, address and date of birth are verified before the first deposit or any play (since 7 May 2019).

What that adds up to is a player sitting in front of a slower, more bounded, more frequently interrupted experience than the unregulated alternative. A £2 stake cap for an 18-24 player is not a small thing; it is roughly half what an older player can wager per spin, and it changes which games the player finds worth playing. A 2.5-second minimum spin interval changes the feel of the session; the difference between a one-second spin and a 2.5-second spin across 500 spins is seven minutes of dead time, and that is not nothing. The Commission has chosen to lengthen the session and shrink the stake, and the choice is on the page because it is the choice a player is voting for or against when they pick a regulated or unregulated site.

Credit cards are banned for gambling since 14 April 2020, including credit cards routed through e-wallets. Anonymous play is not possible at a licensed site. GAMSTOP, the national online self-exclusion scheme, is a mandatory condition of every online licence since 31 March 2020, with periods of six months, one year or five years that cannot be cancelled early. Financial vulnerability checks run at £150 net deposits in a rolling 30 days (from 28 February 2025) using public data only; the wider financial risk assessments are announced but not yet in force. National Gambling Helpline (GamCare) and GambleAware are the support routes every licensed site is required to point a player towards.

The 10x wagering cap that anchors the calculation shelf above is part of the same regulatory package. Mixed-product bonuses — bet on sport, get casino spins — are banned since the same date. None of these rules is binding on an Anjouan-licensed site. Each rule was written into the Commission’s regime for a reason, and the reason is not complicated: the Commission judged that, on balance, the player is better protected with the rule than without it. A site running outside that regime has chosen to write its own rulebook, and a player choosing that site is choosing the rulebook.

The Tax Frame and What the Player Pays

Players pay no tax on gambling winnings in the UK. Operators pay Remote Gaming Duty, raised from 21% to 40% from 1 April 2026. The model on which this page is built is the published rate; a player who wants the rate that applies to a specific period should check with HMRC. The 40% rate is the headline figure for the period after 1 April 2026, and it is the rate the operator absorbs into its offers, its RTP settings, and the size of its bonus budget. The player does not see it as a line on their winnings; the player sees it as a reason offers are smaller, RTPs are tighter, or bonuses are scarcer than they would be in a lower-tax jurisdiction. The trade is silent but real.

Choosing Between the Two, Without Romance

The two shelves a UK player is choosing between are not equal in what they offer, and they are not equal in what they cost. A GB-licensed site binds itself to the Commission’s regime in return for the right to take a GB deposit; an Anjouan-licensed site does not take a GB deposit lawfully and runs on its own house rules. The player who chooses a GB-licensed site pays in identity checks, in stake caps, in wagering caps, in a slower session. The player who chooses an Anjouan-licensed site pays in GAMSTOP absence, in dispute-route absence, in no £2/£5 ceiling on slots, in no 10x cap on bonuses, and in the fact that any protection the player expects is one the operator volunteered rather than one the regulator required.

The two choices are not the same kind of choice, and a player who frames it as “more or fewer protections” has framed it correctly. The Commission’s regime is a floor, not a ceiling; an offshore regime is the operator’s own discretion. A player who reads that sentence and finds the discretion more important than the floor has chosen, and a player who reads it and finds the floor more important has chosen, and the rest of the page is the supporting material each side needs to confirm the choice.

The register is the place the comparison starts and ends. A licence number that parses on the register is a licence number the Commission regulates under; a brand that does not appear on the register is not in the Commission’s regime. Anjouan-licensed sites are not on the register. GB-licensed sites are. The reader does not need a long argument to choose between those two states.

Where the Edge Sits, and Why It Cuts That Way

The house has an edge on every spin on every site, and the edge is unchanged by the licence regime. What the licence regime changes is what the player can do about the edge when the edge goes against them. On a GB-licensed site the player can complain to the Commission, can be excluded by GAMSTOP, can rely on the £2/£5 stake ceiling to keep a session from running away, and can rely on the 10x wagering cap to keep a bonus from being impossible to clear. On an Anjouan-licensed site the player can do none of those things, because the regime does not require the operator to do any of them. The mathematics of the game is the same in both cases; the safety net is not.

The “magic” word the marketing puts on a welcome bonus is “free”. The arithmetic deflates it. A 10x wagering requirement on a £50 bonus is £500 of playthrough at an expected cost of about £20 before any payout. The bonus is not free; it is an interest-bearing advance, and the interest is the wagering requirement’s expected loss. A bonus at a higher multiple — the multiples the Commission no longer permits in a GB-licensed site, the multiples an Anjouan-licensed site can still charge — carries an even larger expected cost. The bigger the multiple, the more the bonus is worth to the operator and the less it is worth to the player. That is the truth behind the word “free”, and it is the same truth on both sides of the licence regime.

The word “safety” gets the same treatment when it appears on an offshore-licensed site. The site is safe in the sense that it pays out when it pays out, just as a GB-licensed site is. It is not safe in the sense that GAMSTOP covers it, that the Commission regulates it, that an ADR can compel a refund, that the £2/£5 stake ceiling binds it, or that the 10x wagering cap applies to its offers. The word does a lot of work in the marketing copy and the work it does is not the work it claims.

Payment Methods as a Side Question

The research file carries background material on payment methods used by GB-facing operators — Apple Pay, AstroPay, and others — and a reader may want to know whether the licence regime affects which payment methods are available. The short answer is that it does not, at the point of deposit: an Anjouan-licensed site can accept any payment method its own cashier integrates, and a GB-licensed site accepts the methods its own cashier integrates, with the Commission’s rule that credit cards are banned for gambling since 14 April 2020, including credit cards routed through e-wallets. Apple Pay itself is developed and operated by Apple Inc., launched on 20 October 2014, with UK-issued cards supported from 14 July 2015, and protects card data through tokenization — replacing the actual card number with a device-specific tokenised Device Primary Account Number and generating a dynamic security code for each transaction. AstroPay was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Uruguay, with a UK entity (Larstal Limited) authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, and an Isle of Man entity (AstroPay Global (IOM) Limited) licensed by the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority for money transmission.

None of that changes the licence question. The payment method a player uses to deposit does not change which regime the deposit lands under, and an e-wallet that is FCA-authorised in the UK does not bring the receiving casino into the Commission’s regime. The receiving casino is regulated, or unregulated, on its own licence — and the licence is what this page has been about from the first sentence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does an Anjouan gambling licence actually authorise?

An Anjouan licence, issued by Anjouan Gaming under the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, authorises the licensee to operate an internet gaming business from Anjouan under the conditions Anjouan Gaming sets. It does not authorise the licensee to take deposits from customers in Great Britain; only a Gambling Commission licence does that, and the Commission’s public register lists every operator that holds one.

Are identity checks still carried out before a first deposit at an Anjouan-licensed site?

Identity checks at an Anjouan-licensed site run on the conditions that site sets, because the Anjouan licence does not require the same checks a Commission licence requires. A GB-licensed site has, since 7 May 2019, been required to verify name, address and date of birth before the first deposit or any play; an Anjouan-licensed site has no equivalent obligation, and the absence of one is part of what the site is selling.

Does GAMSTOP self-exclusion apply at an Anjouan-licensed casino?

No. GAMSTOP is a mandatory condition of every Gambling Commission online licence, and an Anjouan-licensed casino is not on the Commission’s register. The self-exclusion a player sets on GAMSTOP blocks them at GB-licensed sites only, and the player who wants the protection at every site they might visit needs a protection that operates at sites the Commission regulates.

Do the UK’s stake and wagering-requirement caps apply on an Anjouan licence?

No. The £5 / £2 per-spin stake cap and the 10x wagering-requirement cap are conditions of a Gambling Commission licence and apply to GB-licensed sites. An Anjouan-licensed site runs on its own conditions, sets its own stake limits, and sets its own wagering requirements; a UK player on such a site is bound by the site’s terms, not by the Commission’s caps.

Can a UK player use a UK dispute-resolution service if an Anjouan-licensed site refuses a withdrawal?

No approved UK ADR has jurisdiction over an Anjouan-licensed site, because the site is not in the Commission’s regulatory perimeter. The Commission’s complaints route exists for sites it regulates; an Anjouan-licensed site is not one of those, and the player who escalates through the Commission will be told the Commission does not regulate that site. The only remedy is the site’s own internal complaints process, followed by whatever ADR that site has appointed for itself.

Is an Anjouan licence the same as a Gambling Commission licence?

They are not. A Gambling Commission licence is the only authorisation that lets a casino lawfully take a GB deposit; an Anjouan licence does not, and the two are not interchangeable, complementary, or equivalent for a UK player. A casino running on an Anjouan licence alone is operating outside the GB regime, and the player at that casino has none of the protections the GB regime attaches to a deposit.

Published by the signupbonuscheck team.