What an Anjouan casino licence actually changes for a UK player
Available in GBData current as of 23 September 2026, verified against the Gambling Commission’s public register of gambling businesses.
The phrase “Anjouan casino licence” is doing a lot of work in UK-facing search results. Anjouan is an autonomous island in the Union of the Comoros, and the body that issues internet gaming authorisations there is styled the Anjouan Gaming — Internet Gaming Regulatory Authority, operating under the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority. The first thing to be clear about is what it is not. It is not the Gambling Commission. A licence from Anjouan does not put a casino inside the UK regulatory perimeter; it puts it outside it, and the rest of this page is about what that shift costs the player who deposits there.
Table of Contents
- The licensing picture the UK register actually shows
- What an Anjouan licence covers and what it does not
- The protections a UK licence forces on a casino
- What the Commission has done about offshore sites
- The wider UK player-protection frame
- How a UK-licensed brand actually presents on the register
- Side-by-side: what each licence type obliges
- Where this leaves the reader
- Frequently asked questions
The licensing picture the UK register actually shows
How the Gambling Commission keeps its own list
The test of whether a UK-facing brand is licensed is a single public document. The Gambling Commission’s register of gambling businesses, downloadable as CSV and Excel, holds every operator that has been issued with an operating licence for the British market. Each website on that register is listed against the licence account that runs it, with a status of Active, Inactive or White Label. A white-label entry trades under another company’s licence — Virgin Games, for instance, runs as a white-label domain of Gamesys Operations Limited rather than holding its own. On 18 September 2026 the register held 139 businesses holding an active remote casino operating licence, and the domain list carried 1065 active and 361 white-label entries, which together is the working universe of GB-licensed online casinos.
Every licence number on the register follows one shape: a six-digit account number, an “R” marking a remote (online) licence, a five-digit sequence number and a two-digit suffix. So BetVictor’s licence reads 039576-R-319370-028 — account 39576, BV Gaming Limited. The format is consistent across every entry, and a reader who can read it has the working equivalent of the regulator’s own index.
What the Commission actually regulates
The framework rests on the Gambling Act 2005, which received royal assent on 7 April 2005 and created the Commission as the regulator for Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales, not Northern Ireland. Its statutory objectives are three: preventing crime, ensuring fairness, and protecting children and other vulnerable people. Before 2014 a casino licensed in an EEA state, Gibraltar, or a “white-listed” jurisdiction such as Alderney, the Isle of Man, Tasmania or Antigua and Barbuda could lawfully take GB customers without a Commission licence. The Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 closed that door on 1 December 2014: any operator transacting with or advertising to consumers in Great Britain must hold a Commission operating licence, wherever the operator is based, and pay 15% point-of-consumption tax on gross gambling yield from GB customers. The same statute makes it a criminal offence to provide or advertise remote gambling facilities to GB consumers without one.
That last clause is the relevant one for this page. An Anjouan licence, however cleanly issued, does not discharge that obligation. It is a separate authorisation granted by a separate authority; the two regimes do not substitute for each other, and a site that serves a UK depositor on an Anjouan licence alone is serving them outside the Commission’s perimeter.
What an Anjouan licence covers and what it does not
The authority and its standing
Anjouan sits at the eastern end of the Comoros archipelago in the south-western Indian Ocean, autonomous within the Union of the Comoros, with its capital at Mutsamudu. The Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority was set up in 2002 to position the island as an offshore financial centre. Anjouan Gaming operates under that authority and issues separate B2C and B2B internet gaming licences. That is the body that grants the authorisation a UK-facing searcher is asking about.
Two facts about its standing matter for the reader. The Central Bank of Comoros stated in 2014 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. And GIABA’s mutual evaluation report on the Union of the Comoros, based on an on-site visit in July 2023 and published in May 2024, records that gambling is prohibited under the Comorian Penal Code. An offshore gaming licence that is not recognised by the central bank of the issuing country, and that sits against a domestic prohibition on gambling, is not the same kind of authorisation as a Gambling Commission licence, even before the point about UK recognition comes into play.
What “offshore” means in practice for a UK player
A casino serving UK depositors on an Anjouan licence alone is running on its own house rules. The Commission can take action against such sites — cease-and-desist notices, search-engine delisting, payment and hosting referrals — but it has no power to block them at the ISP level. The penalty falls on the operator. The cost to the player is different in kind: no GAMSTOP, no Commission complaints route, no approved ADR. A reader who opens a complaint with the Commission about an Anjouan-only site will be told that the Commission has no jurisdiction over it.
The protections a UK licence forces on a casino
Mandatory GAMSTOP self-exclusion
Every online operating licence issued by the Commission carries GAMSTOP participation as a condition, in force since 31 March 2020. A player who registers with GAMSTOP chooses a six-month, one-year or five-year exclusion and cannot cancel it before the term ends. Every GB-licensed brand must check the GAMSTOP database before allowing play and refuse the excluded player. An Anjouan-licensed site is not required to integrate GAMSTOP at all. Several do, as a matter of commercial choice, but the protection stops being universal the moment the licensing regime changes.
Stake, spin and bonus limits
The UK framework imposes several hard caps on slots. Since 9 April 2025 the maximum stake per game cycle is £5 for players aged 25 and over; since 21 May 2025 it has been £2 for 18-to-24-year-olds. Auto-play has been banned since 31 October 2021, a spin may not complete faster than 2.5 seconds, and losses disguised as wins are prohibited. Wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x since 19 December 2025, and mixed-product bonuses — a sports bet that unlocks casino spins, for example — are banned. None of these caps follow the casino across a licensing boundary. An Anjouan-licensed site runs on its own stake ceiling, its own bonus terms and its own spin interval.
A worked illustration of the wagering cap helps here. Take a £100 bonus at the 10x cap that has been in force since 19 December 2025: the required turnover is £1,000 in qualifying bets. At a £1 stake per spin, that is roughly 1,000 spins; at a £0.20 spin stake on a low-stake slot, around 5,000 spins. Either way, the player’s task is to grind through a fixed amount of qualifying action before any of the bonus balance becomes withdrawable — and that ceiling sits one side of the licensing line, not the other.
Identity, age and financial-vulnerability checks
Anonymous play is not possible at a GB-licensed site. Name, address and date of birth are verified before the first deposit, and the minimum age is 18. Since 7 May 2019 that check runs at the point of deposit, not at withdrawal. A first-time player who cannot produce verified documents does not reach the cashier. Beyond identity, the operator must prompt the player to set a financial limit before the first deposit, in force since 31 October 2025. Financial vulnerability checks run at £150 of net deposits in a rolling 30-day window, using public-data sources only, since 28 February 2025. The wider financial risk assessments the Commission has signalled are not yet in force.
An Anjouan-licensed site carries none of these obligations. KYC procedures vary by operator; a UK resident who chooses one trades the universal guarantee of UK identity standards for whatever policy that particular site has chosen to apply.
What the Commission has done about offshore sites
Disruption, not blocking
The Commission’s enforcement toolkit against offshore sites is disruption. Cease-and-desist notices go to the operator and to payment processors; search-engine delisting is requested; hosting referrals follow. There is no ISP-level block in the Commission’s powers, and no penalty aimed at the player. The result is that some Anjouan-licensed sites remain reachable from a UK IP address, even when the Commission has named them. The player is not committing an offence by visiting; the offence is the operator’s.
The complaints route that does not exist
If an Anjouan-licensed site refuses a withdrawal, the player cannot take the complaint to the Commission or to an ADR provider approved by the Commission. The player can complain to Anjouan Gaming and to whatever payment processor handled the deposit, and that is the route’s full extent. The asymmetry is sharpest here: a licensed operator is bound by an LCCP condition that requires participation in approved ADR, and a refused-withdrawal complaint has a defined destination. Outside that perimeter, the player has whatever leverage their payment method gives them — chargeback, processor dispute — and nothing else.
The wider UK player-protection frame
Help that exists whether or not a casino is licensed
GAMSTOP, GamCare, the National Gambling Helpline and GambleAware are reachable from any jurisdiction. A self-excluded player who finds an unlicensed site has not defeated the protection; they have routed around a tool that the unlicensed site is not bound to honour. Where to get help stays the same; what the casino is required to do does not.
Tax and what the player does not pay
UK players pay no tax on gambling winnings. The fiscal point falls on the operator, in the form of Remote Gaming Duty — raised from 21% to 40% from 1 April 2026. A model, not a confirmation: a reader’s tax position depends on their own circumstances, and HMRC is the source. The point that matters here is that a tax-free player outcome is not a licence — it is a UK-wide rule that applies whether the casino is licensed by the Commission or by Anjouan.
Payments
Credit cards have been banned for gambling since 14 April 2020, including credit-card-funded e-wallet loads. That ban follows the casino into the licensed perimeter only. An Anjouan-licensed site can, in principle, accept a credit card funded through an offshore-issued e-wallet, depending on its own policy. Apple Pay is developed and operated by Apple Inc., launched on 20 October 2014 with US-issued cards and extended to UK-issued cards from 14 July 2015. AstroPay, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Uruguay, operates as a global digital wallet; its 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. Whether any of these methods is offered by an Anjouan-licensed site is a matter of that site’s own payment page — there is no UK rule that imposes the answer.
How a UK-licensed brand actually presents on the register
What the reader sees when they look one up
Every brand below is taken from the Gambling Commission’s public register. The licence number is the live identifier, the licensee name is the regulated entity, and the domain is the entry on the register. The same licence can run several brands — Ladbrokes, Coral and Gala Bingo all sit under LC International Limited, and a reader who knows one of them knows the licensee for the other two. The list is not a ranking and is not a recommendation; it is the register’s own ordering of the top-level entries that the Commission’s search surfaces for this market.
Paddy Power
Paddy Power is listed on the register as an active domain of account 39411, PPB Games Limited, holding the active remote casino operating licence 039411-R-319335-010. The licence has been in continuous active status; the brand sits on a long-established licensee with a regulated UK footprint.
Unibet
Unibet (unibet.co.uk) is listed as an active domain of account 45322, Platinum Gaming Limited, holding licence 045322-R-324275-019. Unibet shares its licensee with other Kindred Group brands in the UK; the licence covers the full UK-GB product.
Sky Vegas
Sky Vegas is listed as an active domain of account 65519, Bonne Terre Gaming Limited, holding licence 065519-R-339675-002. Sky Vegas sits under the wider Sky betting and gaming structure.
kwiff
kwiff is an active domain of account 44448, Eaton Gate Gaming Limited, holding licence 044448-R-323408-017. The brand’s “surprise” stake feature is a product choice, not a regulatory carve-out — the same UK stake caps and bonus caps apply.
bet365
bet365 is an active domain of account 55149, Hillside (UK Gaming) ENC, holding licence 055149-R-331499-004. The ENC suffix reflects a corporate structure outside the immediate UK parent; the licence itself is a Gambling Commission licence in the standard format.
MrQ
MrQ (Mrq.com) is listed as an active domain of account 60629, Tek Fox Ltd, holding licence 060629-R-337532-004. MrQ is one of the smaller standalone names on the register.
Midnite
Midnite (Midnite.com) is listed as an active domain of account 42647, Dribble Media Limited, holding licence 042647-R-321653-022. Midnite launched in the UK with a sports-led product and casino attached; the licence covers both.
Virgin Games
Virgin Games is listed as a white-label domain of account 38905, Gamesys Operations Limited, holding licence 038905-R-319430-022. A white-label entry trades under another company’s licence — Gamesys is the regulated party; the Virgin brand is the consumer-facing wrapper.
BetVictor
BetVictor (Betvictor.com) is listed as an active domain of account 39576, BV Gaming Limited, holding licence 039576-R-319370-028. The brand has been in the UK market for years and sits under a Gibraltar-incorporated parent without that changing the UK licence status.
Grosvenor Casinos
Grosvenor Casinos is listed as an active domain of account 57924, Rank Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited, holding licence 057924-R-334666-005. Grosvenor’s high-street casino operation and online product run through the same group; the online licence covers the digital front.
Side-by-side: what each licence type obliges
| Brand | Licence holder and GB remote casino licence | Domain status on the register | Subject support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paddy Power | PPB Games Limited · 039411-R-319335-010 | Active | — |
| Unibet | Platinum Gaming Limited · 045322-R-324275-019 | Active | — |
| Sky Vegas | Bonne Terre Gaming Limited · 065519-R-339675-002 | Active | — |
| kwiff | Eaton Gate Gaming Limited · 044448-R-323408-017 | Active | — |
| bet365 | Hillside (UK Gaming) ENC · 055149-R-331499-004 | Active | — |
| MrQ | Tek Fox Ltd · 060629-R-337532-004 | Active | — |
| Midnite | Dribble Media Limited · 042647-R-321653-022 | Active | — |
| Virgin Games | Gamesys Operations Limited · 038905-R-319430-022 | White Label | — |
| BetVictor | BV Gaming Limited · 039576-R-319370-028 | Active | — |
| Grosvenor Casinos | Rank Interactive (Gibraltar) Limited · 057924-R-334666-005 | Active | — |
Every entry in this table is a GB-licensed brand taken from the Gambling Commission’s own register. The same row for an Anjouan-licensed site would not have an entry at all, because the Commission does not list Anjouan licences — it lists GB licences, and the absence of a brand from this table is the absence of a UK licence. A reader looking for an Anjouan-licensed brand has to go to that brand’s own page, where the Anjouan authorisation is the only thing the brand has. That asymmetry is what the table makes visible.
Where this leaves the reader
The position the material supports
An Anjouan licence is what an offshore operator gets when it wants to print the word “licensed” on its footer. It does not change the legal position for a UK depositor, who continues to need a Gambling Commission licence for the casino to be operating lawfully. It does not change the protection framework, because that framework is attached to the Commission licence and not to the player. And it does not give a player a UK dispute route, because the Commission has no jurisdiction over it.
A reader who chooses an Anjouan-licensed site is choosing a casino outside the UK perimeter, with the protections that perimeter enforces. That is the choice the licence is, and the rest of the page is the cost of it.
Frequently asked questions
Does an Anjouan gambling licence authorise a casino to take UK players?
No. An Anjouan internet gaming licence authorises the operator to run an online casino under the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority. To take GB players lawfully the operator also needs a Gambling Commission licence, issued under the Gambling Act 2005 and the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014. The two authorisations are separate, and either one alone is not enough.
Are identity checks still carried out at an Anjouan-licensed site?
It depends on the operator’s own policy. The Commission’s KYC obligations — name, address and date of birth verified before the first deposit, since 7 May 2019 — apply only to GB-licensed sites. An Anjouan-licensed site may run the same checks voluntarily, may run lighter ones, or may defer the check to withdrawal. The UK universal guarantee stops at the licensing line.
Does GAMSTOP self-exclusion apply at an Anjouan-licensed casino?
Not automatically. GAMSTOP participation is a condition of every GB online operating licence since 31 March 2020. An Anjouan-licensed site is not bound to integrate the GAMSTOP database. Several do as a commercial choice; the requirement to honour a self-exclusion request stops being universal the moment the licensing regime changes.
Do the UK’s stake and wagering caps apply on an Anjouan licence?
No. The £5 stake-per-game-cycle cap for players aged 25 and over (from 9 April 2025), the £2 cap for 18-to-24-year-olds (from 21 May 2025), the 2.5-second minimum spin interval, the auto-play ban, the 10x wagering cap (from 19 December 2025) and the ban on mixed-product bonuses all attach to GB-licensed operators. An Anjouan-licensed site applies its own stake ceiling, its own bonus terms and its own spin cadence.
Can a UK player use a UK dispute-resolution service against an Anjouan-licensed casino?
No. The Commission’s complaints route and the ADR providers it approves cover GB-licensed operators only. A complaint about an Anjouan-licensed site has to go to the site itself, to Anjouan Gaming, or to the payment processor that handled the deposit. Chargeback or a card dispute is the player-side recourse; the Commission will tell a complainant that it has no jurisdiction over an offshore site.
Is an Anjouan licence the same as a Gambling Commission licence?
No. The two are issued by different authorities under different statutes. The Gambling Commission regulates under the Gambling Act 2005 and the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, with the conditions set out in the LCCP and the Remote Technical Standards. Anjouan Gaming issues licences under the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority, and the Central Bank of Comoros has stated it does not recognise those authorisations. The protections the Commission enforces — GAMSTOP, stake and bonus caps, KYC, ADR — are not part of the Anjouan framework.
Published by the casinopaymentsuk team.
