How to check a Curaçao casino license in 2026 — after the LOK
The master-licence era is over. Here is how to verify a Curaçao licence against the regulator's own validator and register, and how to spot a fake seal.
For twenty years, "licensed in Curaçao" meant almost nothing you could check. Private master-licence holders sold sub-licences, the numbers were not published anywhere useful, and the footer badge on a casino site was usually a static image that led nowhere.
That system is gone. Since 24 December 2024 the Landsverordening op de kansspelen — the National Ordinance on Games of Chance, or LOK — has been in force. The Curaçao Gaming Authority now licenses online operators directly, publishes a register, and runs a validator you can check yourself in about two minutes.
Here is how, and what to distrust.
What the LOK actually changed
Before the LOK, online gaming in Curaçao ran under the Landsverordening buitengaatse hazardspelen (LBH), the offshore hazard games ordinance. Underneath it sat four private master licences — Antillephone's 8048/JAZ and Gaming Curaçao's 365/JAZ among them — each reselling sub-licences to operators the public could not look up.
The LOK abolished that layer. Operators now hold a licence issued directly by the CGA in one of two categories: B2C, to offer games of chance to players, and B2B, to provide services to other licensed operators. The phased reform began in November 2023 under a new Online Gaming Policy; the LOK completed it.
The old law has not vanished entirely — the CGA notes the LBH remains relevant through transitional provisions under Article 15.1 of the LOK. Operators crossing over got provisional licences with a limited life; the CGA extended those by six months in June 2025, from 24 June to 24 December 2025, with full licences conditional on demonstrated compliance progress.
The practical position for a player is simple: if a casino is Curaçao-licensed in 2026, it appears in the CGA's register under its own licence number. A quoted master-licence number like 8048/JAZ is not a current licence and tells you nothing.
Two seals, and they are not interchangeable
This is where most people get it wrong. The CGA issues two seals, and they prove different things.
The Certificate of Operation Seal goes to B2C operators only, and may be displayed only on player-facing sites or apps running on an approved, registered domain. This is the one that matters when you are about to deposit.
The License Certificate Seal is issued to both B2B and B2C holders for display on the operator's corporate website. The CGA states it is not domain-specific and does not authorise the operation of any player-facing website.
So a company can hold a valid CGA licence while the casino domain in front of you is not approved under it. The CGA calls the two "not interchangeable" and treats misuse of either as a possible compliance breach. Checking that a company exists is not the same as checking that this domain is licensed.
The validator: cert.cga.cw
The CGA's rule is unambiguous. The seal must appear exactly as issued — if it differs in design, colour or format, the site is not authorised. Clicking it must redirect you to https://cert.cga.cw, which the CGA describes as a domain it owns and operates. In its January 2026 warning about the GEM55 sites, the regulator added a useful physical detail: a genuine seal appears as a green box.
The certificate page is plain text. It names the company, states it is incorporated under the laws of Curaçao, gives a company registration number and a licence number, cites the LOK, and — for a B2C certificate — lists the approved domains under the heading "Approved domains". A B2B certificate instead names the single corporate website where the seal may be shown.
One quirk that trips people up: live certificates still read "licensed by the Curaçao Gaming Control Board", the regulator's former name. That alone is not a forgery signal.
The test that catches fakes is the domain match. If the certificate lists a different domain from the site you are on, the CGA's own guidance is that the site is displaying someone else's certificate and should be considered unauthorised or fraudulent.
The register, and what it does not tell you
The CGA publishes its online gaming licence register as a dated PDF from the License register page on cga.cw. The 31 August 2026 edition runs to 26 pages. Each row gives the licence number, licensee company, company type (B2B or B2C), company registration number, issue date, expiry date and licence status. Licence numbers look like OGL/2024/1590/0947 or CGA/2025/2516/1271; anything formatted differently is not a current CGA licence number.
Two caveats. It is a snapshot, not a live feed — the CGA says explicitly that the overviews do not guarantee current validity and no rights can be derived from them. And it includes dead licences: entries carry status values such as Expired and Revoked, many of the latter at the operator's own request. A company name in the register proves nothing if you have not read the status column and the expiry date.
Alongside it the CGA publishes land-based casino and enforcement registers, plus a list of certificate holders under Article 5.17 of the LOK covering approved test labs and dispute resolution providers.
Checklist: verify a Curaçao licence in five minutes
- Find the seal in the site footer. No seal on a site claiming a Curaçao licence ends the check.
- Click it. It must open
cert.cga.cw. If it opens nothing, opens a lightbox image, or just scrolls the page, treat the badge as decoration. - Read the URL bar. The host must be exactly
cert.cga.cw— not a subdomain of something else, not a hyphenated variant, not.coor.com. - Check the certificate type. You want a B2C certificate listing approved domains, not a B2B or corporate licence certificate.
- Match the domain. The domain you are playing on must appear under "Approved domains". If it does not, stop.
- Cross-check the register. Open the licence register PDF on cga.cw, find the licence number, and confirm the status is not Expired or Revoked and the expiry date has not passed.
- Read the warnings. The CGA's Public Warnings page names specific impersonating sites.
Red flags
Footer badges that link nowhere. The most common tell. A licence claim with a dead badge is an unverified claim.
Lookalike validator domains. The CGA's warnings describe sites that unlawfully copied its logo and seal detail — keanubet.com in February 2026, which the CGA said falsely impersonated a licensed company, and the GEM55 network in January 2026, named across five domains. Read the host character by character.
A certificate for a different domain. Copying another operator's live certificate link is trivial. The domain match is the whole check.
A licence number in the old format. 8048/JAZ and its relatives are historical master licences, not current CGA licences.
A Curaçao claim in plain text with no seal. A licensed B2C operator has no reason to omit a seal it is required to display.
How this compares: Anjouan, Tobique, MGA
The Malta Gaming Authority sets the benchmark: a searchable licensee register, a separate enforcement register, a recognition notice register, and — most useful to players — a public list of unauthorised URLs. Post-LOK Curaçao has most of that, but its domain-level check lives on the certificate rather than in a central searchable list.
Anjouan runs a public register through anjouangaming.com, administered by Anjouan Licensing Services Inc. for the Anjouan Gaming Board. The weakness is its surroundings, not the register: search for it and several near-identical domains come back, differing by a transposed letter or a .org suffix. Search results will not tell you which is authoritative. Take the domain from the operator's seal link, then verify the host.
Tobique's commission, under the Tobique Gaming Act 2023, publishes a licence holders list and a page naming fraudulent sites at thetgc.ca. It is young, with a thinner public record than Malta or Curaçao.
The honest summary: Curaçao's licence is now genuinely checkable, which it was not two years ago — a real improvement over a very low bar. Checkable is not the same as closely supervised, and none of these authorities settle player disputes. The CGA states plainly that it does not handle individual complaints.
What 99Gamblers does with this
We pin the official validator for each authority on every casino profile, so you are never guessing which domain is the real one. We probe whether that register or validator is actually reachable, because a licence you cannot check is a claim, not a licence. And where we have confirmed an entry in the authority's own register, we mark it with a ✓.
That is the whole of it. We do not test payouts, and we do not tell you a licence makes a casino safe. We tell you whether the licence is real, and how to check it.
Sources
- www.cga.cw/regulation/online-gaming
- www.cga.cw/public-warnings
- portal.cga.cw/page/certification_policy
- cert.cga.cw/
- igamingbusiness.com/legal-compliance/curacao-six-month-extension-provisional-licences/
- www.mga.org.mt/licensee-hub/licensee-register/
- www.mga.org.mt/player-hub/unauthorised-urls/
- anjouangaming.com/public-register/
- thetgc.ca/license-holders/
- thetgc.ca/unlicensed-sites/