Who Really Owns Online Casinos?
When you compare ten online casinos, you assume you're comparing ten businesses. You're usually not. We mapped every active Curaçao Gaming Authority certificate we could verify — 568 live casino domains — back to the company named on each licence. They belong to just 212 operators.
Last updated 26 June 2026 · Every figure on this page is computed directly from our licence dataset.
1. The illusion of choice
Across 568 licensed domains there are only 212 distinct companies — an average of 2.7 brands each. But the spread is lopsided: the ten largest operators alone run 24% of every domain in the dataset, and 82% of all domains belong to a company that runs two or more brands. The "independent" casino next door is very often the same business.
New Era B.V. alone is named on 16 separate casino domains — each marketed as its own brand. You can verify every one:
2. One licence, many brands
Ownership concentration goes a layer deeper: a single licence number frequently covers a whole stable of casinos. We found 111 licence numbers shared across two or more live domains. Same licence means the same legal entity, the same regulator file — and, in practice, the same terms, wallet and support desk.
Licence OGL/2024/181/0181 appears on 16 different casino domains:
3. Roughly 1 in 6 can't show a valid certificate
A Curaçao licence is supposed to come with a per-domain digital seal that anyone can verify. When we scanned operating casino sites, 568 produced a valid, decodable certificate — but 115 showed no certificate at all and 4 carried a broken certificate link. That's about 17% of the domains we checked that couldn't produce a working licence at the time of our scan, despite running live, real-money casinos.
This is exactly why we built a public licence checker — so you can confirm a casino's seal resolves to a real register entry before you deposit, in seconds.
4. The wider licensing map
Curaçao is one jurisdiction among many. In total we mirror 52 licensed registers covering 9,192 domains. Tiers reflect how hard a licence is to obtain and how much player protection it carries — a Curaçao seal is not a UK Gambling Commission licence.
Cite this report
TopCasinoScout, “Who Really Owns Online Casinos?” (updated 26 June 2026). Source: topcasinoscout.com/who-owns-online-casinos
Journalists and researchers welcome — every licence above links to the official, independently verifiable certificate. Get in touch for the underlying dataset.
Methodology & limitations
Operators and domains are taken from official Curaçao Gaming Authority digital certificates (cert.cga.cw / cert.gcb.cw), each independently verifiable via the licence checker links above. "Operator" is the company named on the certificate; brands sharing an operator name or a licence number are counted as one owner. The verification gap counts domains with a live site that returned no certificate or a broken certificate link at scan time — it is a snapshot, not proof a licence doesn't exist. The scrape is partial and grows over time, so totals are conservative (real concentration is likely higher, not lower). National-register figures come from each regulator's own published list.