Checking whether a betting site is licensed, without taking anybody's word

Search the regulator's register for the DOMAIN, not the brand. The domain file lists 2,243 addresses declared to the regulator, each tied to the account number of the company responsible for it. A site whose domain is not on that list is not a site the regulator has been told about.

Brand names are marketing and can be invented in an afternoon; a domain is the thing you actually typed and the thing an operator has to declare. Working from the domain also survives the common case where the brand on the page and the company behind it are different, which on this register is 1,162 accounts of 2,650 — not a majority, but far too many to treat as the exception.

A missing domain is not automatically proof of anything illegal — a site may be licensed elsewhere and not aimed at Great Britain at all. What it does mean is that this particular regulator has no record of it, so this particular set of protections does not apply to you there.

And that is the trap. The check gets done on the brand and stops at the first plausible result. Several brands can look like a licensed company without being it, and the domain is the one field that cannot be argued with.

What to do with it. Check the domain, then read the STATUS on every licence attached to the account. Active is one of seven values it can hold, and the other six all mean something.