A register, not a seal
A concession and a licence are not the same thing
The Austrian concession and a licence from Curaçao or Malta are two different things with two different kinds of backing — and you can look both of them up yourself in a public register.
Two words that mean different things
On comparison sites the two terms run together, usually in the same sentence. That is no accident, because the confusion is useful: “licensed and regulated” sounds like Austrian supervision, even when what is meant is a register on a Caribbean island.
What that difference means for each page here is set out on crypto casino Austria.
We keep the words apart. A concession is what the Austrian gambling act grants. A licence is what Curaçao, Malta or another jurisdiction grants. The difference is not in how they sound but in who faces whom when something goes wrong.
The Finanzamt Österreich grants the concession under §14 GSpG, and while one is in force no second may be issued. A licence from Curaçao, Malta or Anjouan is a different thing: a different grantor, a different supervisor, a different register. Both can be looked up, and that is exactly what separates them from a seal in the footer.
What stands behind the Austrian concession
It is granted under §14 GSpG: the statute gives the Finanzamt Österreich the power to transfer the right to run the games covered by §§6 to 12b by way of a concession. The same authority — its office for special jurisdictions — has, according to the finance ministry, also supervised concessioned gambling since 1 January 2021.
Three things sit in that same section, and they describe the build of this concession better than any advertising line:
There is only one. Under subsection 1, no second concession may be granted while the existing one is in force.
It is time-limited. To fifteen years at most.
It is backed by capital. The company has to show at least 109 million euros of paid-up share capital for it.
Who holds it can be found in the official list of federal concession holders at bmf.gv.at: Österreichische Lotterien GmbH, for electronic lotteries on win2day.at, running out on 30 September 2027. What follows from that for every other operator, and what is before parliament right now, is on the page on the legal position.
What stands behind an offshore licence
A licence from Curaçao, Malta or Anjouan is a permission under the law of the issuing country, tied to that country's requirements for the company, the payout procedure and complaint routes. It is not worthless — it is something else. It says nothing about Austria, and it does not replace a concession that does not exist a second time.
What it gives you in practice is an addressee: an authority a complaint can go to, and a register in which it can be checked whether a particular operator is covered at all. That is exactly what you should use, instead of believing the seal in the footer.
The register entry first, then the holder of the company. After that the withdrawal rules and the limits, and last the support desk and the complaint history. The order follows effort and discriminating power: the first two together take a few minutes and sort out the larger part.
How to check a Curaçao licence
The Curaçao Gaming Authority runs two sources, and you need both, because they can contradict each other.
Step one — the certificate portal. Address: cert.cga.cw/search. The index runs on domains and company names, not on licence numbers. So you type in the domain you actually play on, not the number from the footer.
Step two — reading the result. A hit leads to a “Certificate of Operation” with the company, the company number, the licence number, the date of issue and the current status. Three answers are possible and they mean different things: an active certificate, a certificate marked Revoked — the licence has been withdrawn — or the note that this domain has been removed from the register. The third answer is the quietest and the most telling: the seal on the site may have been sitting there for a long time while the cover is gone.
Step three — cross-reading the PDF register. Through cga.cw a list is additionally published as a PDF, with number, company, B2B or B2C, company number, dates of issue and expiry, and status. What that list does not have is a column for domains.
Step four — taking the contradictions seriously. For the same licence numbers the portal can show an active status while the PDF shows a review in progress together with an expiry date already past. What matches reliably are above all the company numbers. From that follows a rule we apply consistently on this site: “licence checked”, without saying which of the two registers was opened and when, is not a statement.
Anjouan has a public register of its own at anjouangaming.com, which at least carries the domains covered. There too the expiry date beside the status is worth a look, because the two do not always tell the same story.
How to check a Malta licence
The Malta Gaming Authority keeps its register at mga.org.mt/licensee-hub/licensee-register/. You can search there by company name, status, URL or type of gaming service — the URL search is the one that matters to you, because it answers the same question as the Curaçao portal: is this exact domain covered?
Alongside it the MGA keeps an enforcement register with the measures it has taken. That is the second look worth taking: a valid licence and an entry in the enforcement register do not rule each other out.
What “licence withdrawn” means — and what the seal does not prove
A withdrawal is not a formality. It means the regulator has ended the permission; the company can keep running servers and keep taking deposits, only now without the cover it advertises. Between the withdrawal and the change in a website's footer stands nobody but the operator itself.
Hence the most important sentence on this page: the seal in the footer is a picture. It is not a query, it does not update itself, and it says only what somebody put there. The only thing with evidential weight is what stands in the regulator's own register, together with the day you looked. Two minutes — the same two minutes that apply to the checks to run on an operator and to the recalculable fairness of a game.
What is not settled here
We do not claim that any particular licence is valid today. Register entries change, and a sentence on a text page cannot track that — which is why what stands here are the addresses of the registers and not their contents. Nor do we claim what an authority actually checks before issuing; we have not worked through the published rulebooks of the individual jurisdictions for that. How we mark gaps of that kind is set out in the methodology.
How the difference plays into the other fields a player can check for themselves is on crypto casino in Austria.