The legal section

The regulator, and how to check a licence in one minute

The Gambling Commission licenses operators, writes the conditions they work under and publishes a register anybody can search. The register is the single most useful page in British gambling and the least used, which is the reason this site puts an account number on every card.

What the Commission is, and what it is not

The Gambling Commission is a non-departmental public body created by the Gambling Act 2005, and it does three jobs that a reader meets in different places; it licenses operators and the people who run them, it writes the conditions and codes those licences carry, and it takes enforcement action when a condition is broken.

What it is not is an ombudsman. The Commission does not decide individual disputes, does not order an operator to pay a particular player, and will tell you so if you ask; a complaint about a withdrawal goes to the operator and then to an approved «alternative dispute resolution» body, and the Commission uses the pattern of complaints rather than the individual one. That division confuses a great many readers, and it is worth absorbing before a reader needs it. Reporting a problem to the Commission is useful and it is not a route to getting your money!

The «register», which is the useful part

The Commission publishes a «public register» of everybody it licenses, free and without an account, and it is the single most useful page in British gambling, and it takes a company name, a trading name or an account number, and it returns the company (the trading names declared under it), the activities permitted and the status of each.

The account number is the most reliable of the three inputs, which is why we print one on every card. Trading names are declared by the «licensee» and are sometimes recorded in a form nobody else uses: one brand on this site is filed under a spelling that a search for its own name does not find, and a reader concluding from that search that the brand is unlicensed would be wrong.

Enforcement, and where to read it

The Commission publishes its regulatory and enforcement actions against companies, with the breach, the outcome and the sum, and the archive is more informative about an operator than any review. It is organised by «licensee» rather than by brand, which means a reader searching the name on the door will often find nothing while the record sits one level up.

The pattern across recent years is consistent: the largest penalties concern anti-money-laundering failures and social responsibility failures, and the second category is the one a player should read, because it describes what the operator did when a customer's play became obviously harmful. A company that has been penalised for failing to intervene has a documented habit, and the document is public, and the Commission also reviews supplier licences, which is a quieter tool with more reach. A games studio found to have allowed its games onto unlicensed sites can lose the entitlement that lets it supply anybody, which is a stronger lever against the unlicensed market than anything aimed at the sites themselves.

What the Commission has asked for and not yet got

As at November 2025 the Commission had no power to order an internet provider to block a site, and no power to order a payment provider to stop a transaction, and its stated tools against unlicensed operators were cease-and-desist letters and requests to search engines to remove results, which work slowly and partially. The Crime and Policing Bill, introduced on the twenty-fifth of February 2025, would give it powers to order the suspension of IP addresses and domain names. The Bill was before the House of Lords in November 2025 and its outcome should be checked against the current parliamentary record rather than taken from a page like this one.

Questions readers ask

Can the Gambling Commission get my money back from an operator?

No, and it says so plainly. It regulates operators and takes enforcement action against them; it does not adjudicate individual disputes. A complaint goes first to the operator and then, after eight weeks or a deadlock letter, to an approved alternative dispute resolution provider, which can make a decision binding on the operator.

Is it worth complaining to the Commission at all?

Yes, as information rather than as a remedy. The Commission uses the pattern of complaints to decide where to look, and several of the largest social responsibility penalties of recent years began with complaints that individually went nowhere.

How do I check whether a site is licensed?

Search registers.gamblingcommission.gov.uk for the account number, the trading name or the company. If none of the three finds it, the site is not licensed to take bets from people in Great Britain. Do not rely on a «licence number» printed in a site's own footer without checking it, because printing one is easy.

What does it mean if an entitlement shows a date?

The date is when the company gained that entitlement, and it is occasionally the most interesting thing on the record. Three brands on this site gained a virtual-event betting entitlement on 1 October 2026, which is recent enough that no page written about them before that date mentions it.

By the UK Pound Casino editorial team · Last updated November 2026 · Online since 2026