Anjouan casino licence UK 2026: the offshore authorisation a UK player should read before signing up

Updated September 2026

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An Anjouan casino licence is a remote gambling authorisation issued by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, a body on the smallest of the Comoros islands. It is not a Gambling Commission licence. For a UK resident that distinction is the whole question, because under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 only a Commission-licensed operator can lawfully accept a deposit from a player in Great Britain. An Anjouan licence is what an offshore site carries in its footer when it has nothing else. What follows is what that means for the player, the operator and the regulator that has no jurisdiction over either of them.

Current as of 23 September 2026. Licence claims checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register of gambling businesses.

What an Anjouan licence is, and why it sits outside the UK frame

The island, the authority, and a permission no central bank recognises

Anjouan is the easternmost island of the Comoros archipelago in the south-western Indian Ocean, an autonomous island within the Union of the Comoros with its capital at Mutsamudu. The Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority was established in 2002 to promote the island as an offshore financial centre and tax haven. In 2014 the Central Bank of Comoros stated that no licence had been delivered for offshore financial activities on Anjouan and that it does not recognise licences issued by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority.

The gaming side sits inside that same authority under the name Anjouan Gaming, styled the “Internet Gaming Regulatory Authority”. It issues separate B2C and B2B internet gaming licences. The wider picture is starker: GIABA’s May 2024 mutual evaluation report on the Union of the Comoros, based on an on-site visit in July 2023, records that gambling is prohibited under the Comorian Penal Code. An Anjouan gaming licence is a permission issued under a finance authority whose central bank disowns it, on an island whose own penal code forbids the activity the licence permits. That is the document a UK player is being asked to rely on.

The UK frame: a Commission licence or nothing

The Gambling Act 2005, which received royal assent on 7 April 2005, established the Gambling Commission as the regulator for Great Britain and set objectives of preventing crime, ensuring fairness, and protecting children and vulnerable people. Before the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, operators licensed in the European Economic Area, Gibraltar, or “white-listed” jurisdictions such as Alderney, the Isle of Man, Tasmania and Antigua and Barbuda could serve Great Britain customers without a Gambling Commission licence. That carve-out closed on 1 December 2014, when the 2014 Act came into force: any remote gambling operator transacting with or advertising to consumers in Great Britain must hold a Gambling Commission operating licence, regardless of where the operator is based, and pay 15% point-of-consumption tax on gross gambling yield from GB customers.

The offence is statutory. Under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014’s point-of-consumption regime, it is a criminal offence to provide or advertise remote gambling facilities to Great Britain consumers without a Gambling Commission licence, regardless of any licence, such as one from Anjouan, that the operator holds elsewhere. The Commission disrupts illegal sites through cease-and-desist notices, search-engine delisting and payment and hosting referrals, but has no ISP-blocking power. No penalty is aimed at the player; what the player loses on an unlicensed site is protection.

What a Commission-licensed site has to do that an Anjouan site does not

The LCCP and the Commission’s social responsibility code stack obligations onto every Commission-licensed operator that an Anjouan licence does not mirror:

• Identity is verified before the first deposit or any play, since 7 May 2019. Name, address and date of birth are checked, and anonymous play is not possible at a licensed site.
• Every online licence has GAMSTOP as a mandatory condition, in force since 31 March 2020, with periods of six months, one year or five years that cannot be cancelled early.
• Online slots carry a maximum stake per game cycle of £5 for players aged 25 and over, from 9 April 2025, and £2 for 18-24-year-olds, from 21 May 2025.
• Since 31 October 2021 auto-play is banned, a slot spin may not be faster than 2.5 seconds, and losses disguised as wins are banned.
• Operators must prompt a customer to set a financial limit before the first deposit, from 31 October 2025; there is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling, but the prompt is mandatory.
• Financial vulnerability checks run at £150 net deposits in a rolling 30 days from 28 February 2025, using public data only.
• Credit cards are banned for gambling since 14 April 2020, including credit cards routed through e-wallets.
• Since 19 December 2025 wagering requirements are capped at 10x and mixed-product bonuses, such as bet on sport, get casino spins, are banned.

None of these is enforceable by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority against an operator it has licensed. None of them travels with the Anjouan document.

The protections a UK player gives up on an Anjouan-licensed site

Identity checks, or the absence of them

On a Commission-licensed site, identity is verified before the first deposit or any play. On an Anjouan-licensed site, the standard is whatever the operator has decided to set; some still run document checks at withdrawal, others run none at all, and the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority is not in a position to compel a higher standard than the licensee chooses to advertise. The practical question for a UK resident is whether the absence of a Commission-mandated check at sign-up is a feature or a bug. It is marketed as a feature — “play without sending your passport” — and it is a real cost: the same check is the one that catches self-excluded players, blocks underage accounts and produces the audit trail that a UK dispute body would otherwise rely on.

GAMSTOP, and what bypassing it means

GAMSTOP is the national online self-exclusion scheme, and it is a mandatory condition of every online Commission licence since 31 March 2020. Self-exclusion can be set for six months, one year or five years, and cannot be cancelled early. A player who has registered with GAMSTOP and then opens an account at an Anjouan-licensed site is not committing an offence; GAMSTOP is a condition of a UK licence, not a prohibition on the player. The site, however, is one the player has actively sought out to get around the exclusion they set themselves. The protection the player installed is not breached; it is simply absent.

Stake caps, wagering caps, and what they protect against

The £5 / £2 stake cap per game cycle is a Commission condition, not a feature of the slot. The 10x wagering-requirement cap on bonuses is a Commission condition, in force since 19 December 2025. The 2.5-second minimum spin interval is a Commission condition, and the ban on losses disguised as wins is a Commission condition. Each of them is a number the Commission wrote down because the evidence base said the harm it was responding to was real. An Anjouan-licensed site can run at any stake, any wagering multiple, any spin speed and any visual presentation of losses that the operator chooses.

Dispute resolution, and where it goes to die

A Commission-licensed operator sits inside an approved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) route that a UK player can use without cost. If the operator refuses a withdrawal, the player can complain to the Commission and, if the operator is signed up to one, to an ADR provider. At an Anjouan-licensed site there is no UK route. The complaint goes back to the operator, and if the operator refuses, it goes to the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, whose remit, staffing and enforcement record for individual player disputes are not what a UK reader expects from a regulator.

Other consequences that follow from the same gap

• No UK National Gambling Helpline referral pathway built into the site’s safer-gambling tools; the player has to find GamCare and GambleAware themselves.
• No mandatory financial vulnerability check at the £150 rolling 30-day threshold, no prompt to set a deposit limit before the first deposit.
• No automatic-play ban enforced at the game level, no minimum spin interval enforced at the game level.
• No credit-card ban enforced at the cashier; the offshore cashier takes what the operator decides to take.
• No Commission oversight of the operator’s marketing in the UK, no requirement to take down an advertisement that breaches the LCCP.

The register, the licences, and the brand behind the URL

What the Commission’s public register actually lists

The Gambling Commission’s public register is the test of whether a brand holds a UK licence. The register listed 139 businesses holding an active remote casino operating licence on 18 September 2026, and can be searched online and downloaded in full as CSV or Excel files. The register’s domain list records each website against the licence account that runs it, with a status of Active, Inactive or White Label; on the same date it held 1065 active and 361 white-label domain entries — a white-label site trades under another company’s licence. A remote casino licence number on the register has the form account-R-number–suffix, where the leading six digits repeat the licence holder’s account number and the “R” marks a remote (online) licence.

How to read a licence number, with the brand as the worked example

The format is account-R-number–suffix. Take a number from the register — say 039411-R-319335-010. The leading six digits are 039411, which is the licence holder’s account number; the “R” marks it as remote; 319335 is the licence number itself; and 010 is the suffix that increments when the Commission issues a fresh licence under the same account. The same convention applies across the register, so a reader who can decode one number can decode all of them. The work the Commission does here is light-touch: it is a public list, not a quality mark, and the reader’s job is to use it as a check rather than as an endorsement.

What the register says about the brands in this comparison

The ten brands in the comparison that follows are taken from the Commission’s public register; each one is the domain that the licence account lists against it. Several brands share one licensee — Ladbrokes, Coral and Gala Bingo all sit under LC International Limited — and presenting them as independent operators would misread the register. Every GB-licensed online operator must take part in GAMSTOP. Coral, for example, is listed under licence 054743-R-330863-014, active as of 18 September 2026.

The 10 GB-licensed brands that an Anjouan site is not

The Anjouan column is empty by design. None of these ten brands relies on an Anjouan licence; each is a Commission-licensed operator on the register. The cell where a reader might have expected “Yes” or “No” is a dash because the question is the wrong one for this set — every entry here is, by construction, the answer the regulator recognises.

Paddy Power — the Commission-licensed incumbent against which an offshore site is weighed

Paddy Power is listed on the Gambling Commission register as an active domain of account 39411, PPB Games Limited, which holds the active remote casino operating licence 039411-R-319335-010. The brand sits inside a Commission licence that obliges it to verify identity before the first deposit, to take part in GAMSTOP, to cap online slot stakes at £5 or £2 per game cycle depending on age, to apply the 10x wagering-requirement cap to any bonus it offers and to honour financial vulnerability checks at the £150 rolling 30-day threshold. The same obligations apply to every other brand in this comparison. Paddy Power’s role here is the baseline: it is what a Commission-licensed UK-facing casino looks like at the licence level, and the comparison that follows reads its peers against that baseline.

Unibet — the multi-jurisdiction brand operating under a Commission licence

Unibet (unibet.co.uk) is a domain under the Platinum Gaming Limited account 45322, which holds the active remote casino operating licence 045322-R-324275-019. The brand also operates in other jurisdictions under separate licences, providing a model that an offshore-only brand cannot replicate for the UK market without its own Commission licence. Comparing an Anjouan-licensed site to Unibet means weighing a single offshore authorisation against a stack of regulatory conditions including the LCCP.

Sky Vegas — the broadcaster-tied Commission licence

Sky Vegas is a domain attributed to account 65519, Bonne Terre Gaming Limited, the holder of remote casino licence 065519-R-339675-002. As the casino product of a UK pay-TV broadcaster, it benefits from a corporate structure that an offshore operator cannot easily duplicate, lacking the UK broadcast footprint required to anchor a similar setup.

kwiff — the smaller-scale Commission licence

kwiff (Kwiff.com) links to Eaton Gate Gaming Limited (account 44448), and is covered by remote casino licence 044448-R-323408-017. Though smaller than some rivals, kwiff must still adhere to all Commission safer-gambling conditions, including identity checks, GAMSTOP, and stake caps. No operator is exempt from these requirements based on its scale; the rules attach to the licence account itself.

bet365 — the largest UK-facing brand under a Commission licence

bet365 (Bet365.com) is an active domain associated with account 55149, Hillside (UK Gaming) ENC, which provides services under remote casino licence 055149-R-331499-004. The same LCCP conditions apply. The brand’s scale does not exempt it from the £5 / £2 stake cap, the 10x wagering-requirement cap or the GAMSTOP requirement, and the same is true at the smallest end of the register.

MrQ — the no-wagering-bonus model under a Commission licence

MrQ (Mrq.com) is run by Tek Fox Ltd (account 60629) and operates under the remote casino licence 060629-R-337532-004. By promoting a no-wagering-bonus model, MrQ demonstrates how a Commission-licensed operator can choose to stay well below the 10x wagering cap while maintaining competitive margins. Offshore sites without such caps lack this baseline regulation.

Midnite — the newer Commission licence, same obligations

Midnite (Midnite.com) appears on the register as part of account 42647, Dribble Media Limited, which uses remote casino licence 042647-R-321653-022. The suffix “022” indicates multiple remote licences have been issued to this account over time, all of which fall under the same LCCP regulatory framework.

Virgin Games — the white-label brand under a Commission licence

Virgin Games is listed on the register as a white-label domain of account 38905, Gamesys Operations Limited, which holds the active remote casino operating licence 038905-R-319430-022. A white-label site trades under another company’s licence; the Virgin Games brand is not the licence holder, Gamesys Operations Limited is. The Commission’s safer-gambling conditions still attach because they attach to the licence account, not to the brand on the front of the site. A reader who sees a familiar brand name on the URL and assumes it is the licence holder is misreading the register.

BetVictor — the long-established Commission licence

BetVictor (Betvictor.com) is operated by BV Gaming Limited (account 39576) via remote casino licence 039576-R-319370-028. This account has a long-standing history with the Commission, and the LCCP obligations apply to all active licences within that sequence.

Grosvenor Casinos — the land-based operator’s online arm under a Commission licence

Grosvenor Casinos is listed under account 57924, Rank Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited, featuring remote casino licence 057924-R-334666-005. It is important to distinguish the brand’s online arm from its UK land-based casino operations; they share a name but are separate entities, with the online site held by the Gibraltar entity. This reinforces the need to check the register, as the brand name a player sees doesn’t always reflect the underlying licence holder.

What a 10x wagering cap actually caps, in time and turnover

The wagering-requirement cap that came into force on 19 December 2025 is 10x. This limit helps players estimate how much turnover is required to clear bonus offers.

A £100 bonus carries a turnover requirement of £1,000 before withdrawal. At a £1 stake per spin on a slot running at a typical 96% RTP, that is 1,000 spins, each at the Commission’s 2.5-second minimum interval, which works out to roughly 42 minutes of continuous play. A £250 bonus carries a turnover requirement of £2,500, or roughly 1 hour 44 minutes at the same stake and interval. A £500 bonus carries a turnover requirement of £5,000, or roughly 3 hours 28 minutes.

The same arithmetic at the £2 stake cap that applies to 18-24-year-olds from 21 May 2025 halves the spin count and roughly halves the time. At the £5 cap that applies to players aged 25 and over from 9 April 2025 the spin count drops to a fifth and the time to roughly 8 minutes for a £100 bonus, 21 minutes for a £250 bonus, 42 minutes for a £500 bonus — but the player is moving £5 per spin rather than £1, and the bankroll required to fund the wagering requirement is five times higher.

The 10x cap is what stops an operator from running a 40x bonus that takes £4,000 of turnover to clear a £100 offer. The arithmetic above is what that cap looks like in play, and the band — minutes to a few hours of slot play depending on stake, bonus size and age bracket — is what the player is actually being asked to do.

The payment-method backdrop an offshore cashier does not share

Apple Pay — the UK-issued card tokenisation that an Anjouan cashier may or may not accept

Apple Pay is developed and operated by Apple Inc. and launched on 20 October 2014, initially supporting only US-issued payment cards. It began supporting UK-issued payment cards on 14 July 2015. Apple Pay protects card data through tokenization, replacing the actual card number with a device-specific tokenised Device Primary Account Number and generating a dynamic security code for each transaction. Apple Pay in-store payments use near-field communication (NFC) to communicate wirelessly with contactless payment terminals.

On a Commission-licensed UK site the cashier is bound by the credit-card ban that has been in force since 14 April 2020, including credit cards routed through e-wallets. Apple Pay funded from a credit card fails that test; Apple Pay funded from a debit card does not. On an Anjouan-licensed site the cashier is bound by nothing comparable, and the operator decides what to accept. The Commission’s position is that the prohibition catches the funding source, not the front-end technology; the offshore cashier takes the same funding source and asks nothing about it.

On an iPhone with Face ID, Apple Pay in-store purchases are authenticated by double-clicking the side button; on models with Touch ID, by double-clicking the Home button. Apple states that a supported card from a participating card issuer is required to use Apple Pay, and that Apple Pay is not available in all markets. The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalised a rule in November 2024 bringing large nonbank digital wallet operators, including Apple Pay, under bank-like federal oversight, and the European Commission opened an investigation in 2020 into whether Apple abused its control of iPhone NFC hardware to block rival payment apps’ access to contactless payments. The regulatory pressure on the wallet is real; the regulatory pressure on the offshore cashier accepting it is not.

AstroPay — the e-money institution whose UK entity the Commission can reach, and whose offshore parent it cannot

AstroPay was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Uruguay, and operates as a global digital wallet offering online payments, virtual and physical debit cards, and peer-to-peer transfers. AstroPay spun off its payment-processing business, dLocal, as a separate company in 2016. AstroPay’s UK entity, Larstal Limited, is an electronic money institution authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, and its Isle of Man entity, AstroPay Global (IOM) Limited, is licensed by the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority for money transmission.

A Commission-licensed UK casino taking a deposit via AstroPay is dealing with an entity the FCA regulates for the money-transmission side; the casino is regulated by the Commission for the gambling side. An Anjouan-licensed site taking the same deposit is dealing with the same wallet but is not itself regulated by the Commission, and the player has no Commission complaints route if the deposit does not arrive or the withdrawal does not leave. AstroPay’s UK status is what makes the wallet a normal payment method for a UK-facing licensed casino; the offshore casino’s relationship to that status is incidental.

What the player takes on, in plain prose

The single sentence an Anjouan licence cannot carry

A Commission-licensed online casino is licensed to take a UK player’s deposit. An Anjouan-licensed online casino is licensed to take an Anjouan-licensed player’s deposit, and licensed to advertise to UK players because the operator has decided to do so, with the offshore authorisation as the only document behind it. The first sentence is the one that gives the player GAMSTOP, the £5 / £2 stake cap, the 10x wagering-requirement cap, the 2.5-second minimum spin interval, the identity check at sign-up, the financial vulnerability check at £150 rolling 30 days and a UK ADR route if the operator refuses a withdrawal. The second sentence gives the player none of those.

What that looks like in the worst case, and in the ordinary case

The worst case is the one that makes the comparison worth doing: a player registers with GAMSTOP, then opens an account at an Anjouan-licensed site because the exclusion is not enforceable there. The site is marketed as “no verification needed”, and the marketing is accurate at the sign-up step. A few months later the player requests a withdrawal and the operator declines it on the basis of an unfavourable bonus term. There is no UK ADR to complain to. The complaint goes back to the operator, and if the operator refuses, it goes to the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, whose remit for individual player disputes is not what a UK reader expects. The ordinary case is less dramatic and more common: a player signs up, plays, withdraws, never looks at the licence page in the footer, and never knows which jurisdiction the operator answers to. The cost of the Anjouan licence, in the ordinary case, is the absence of the protections the player never had to invoke.

What an Anjouan licence is for, if it is being read straight

An Anjouan licence is for an operator that wants to take deposits from multiple jurisdictions under a single authorisation and is willing to operate outside the UK frame to do so. For a player in Great Britain that frame is the question, not the brand. The brand can be familiar, the games can be the same, the cashier can take Apple Pay and AstroPay; the licence in the footer is the document that decides which regulator answers the phone when the player calls.

Frequently asked questions

What does an Anjouan gambling licence actually authorise?

It authorises the operator to take online gambling deposits under a remote licence issued by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, an autonomous body on the Comoros island of Anjouan. It does not authorise the operator to take deposits from players in Great Britain; that requires a Gambling Commission licence, under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, regardless of any other authorisation the operator holds.

Are ID checks still carried out before a first deposit at an Anjouan-licensed site?

At a Commission-licensed UK site, yes, and the check is mandatory before the first deposit or any play. At an Anjouan-licensed site the standard is whatever the operator chooses to set, because the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority does not impose a UK-equivalent identity check. Some operators still verify at withdrawal, some verify on demand and some verify at all; the reader cannot assume a sign-up check.

Does GAMSTOP self-exclusion apply at an Anjouan-licensed casino?

No. GAMSTOP is a mandatory condition of every Gambling Commission online licence, in force since 31 March 2020, with periods of six months, one year or five years that cannot be cancelled early. An Anjouan-licensed site is not on GAMSTOP, and a player who has registered a self-exclusion and then opens an account at one is not committing an offence — the site is simply not part of the scheme the player signed up to.

Do the UK’s stake and wagering-requirement caps apply on an Anjouan licence?

No. The £5 stake cap per game cycle for players aged 25 and over, the £2 cap for 18-24-year-olds, the 10x wagering-requirement cap on bonuses, the 2.5-second minimum spin interval, the ban on losses disguised as wins and the ban on credit-card gambling are all Commission conditions, in force from the dates in the section above. An Anjouan-licensed site can run at any stake, any wagering multiple, any spin speed and any visual presentation of losses the operator chooses.

Can a UK player use a UK dispute-resolution service if an Anjouan-licensed site refuses a withdrawal?

No. The Commission’s approved ADR route covers Commission-licensed operators. An Anjouan-licensed operator is not signed up to a UK ADR provider, and the Commission’s complaints procedure does not extend to it. The complaint goes back to the operator and, if the operator refuses, to the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority — which is not the regulator a UK reader expects to be dealing with.

Is an Anjouan licence the same thing as a Gambling Commission licence?

No. A Commission licence is issued by the Gambling Commission under the Gambling Act 2005 and is the only authorisation that lets an operator lawfully accept a deposit from a player in Great Britain, under the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014. An Anjouan licence is issued by the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority under Comoros autonomous regulation, which the Central Bank of Comoros does not recognise and which sits inside a jurisdiction whose own penal code prohibits gambling.

Created by the ”livecasinoguideuk” editorial team.