Who holds the licence behind a gambling brand?

Ask whether a gambling brand is licensed in Great Britain and you get a yes or a no. Both answers hide the thing that actually matters when something goes wrong: the company named on the website is frequently not the company holding the licence. We downloaded the Gambling Commission’s register on 29 August 2026 and counted.

A brand gets three answers from this register, not two

The register publishes a Status against every domain and trading name, and it is the column that carries the meaning. Ignoring it is how a licence check produces a confident, wrong sentence.

Thirty-six per cent of every domain in the register is Inactive. A checker that reports “found in the register” without reading the status will tell you a dead brand is licensed.

Who actually holds the licence

These are brands a British customer meets in television advertising and shirt sponsorship. The right-hand column is the company the Commission licenses, taken from the register on 29 August 2026.

Four of those brands — Heart Bingo, talkSPORT BET, Betano and Parimatch — are white labels on the same licence. One company answers for all four, and its name appears on none of the four websites.

The bet365 line is the one that breaks naive checking. Search the register’s business file for “bet365” and you get zero results, because the licences are held by Hillside entities. A checker reading only that file would report one of the largest licensed operators in the country as unlicensed.

The white-label houses

Thirty-four licensees hold all 373 white-label domains. The largest carry more brands than most people realise exist:

If two sites look like different companies and behave identically, this table is usually why.

A record in the register is not a licence

Two licensees make the point, and they make it in different ways.

TGP Europe Limited, account 38898, holds 24 domains and every one of them is Inactive — not most, all of them. Among the brands: 12bet.uk, bk8.uk, bcgame.uk, duelbits.co.uk, 8xbet.co.uk, betvision.com.

Here the reason is public, and we should have said so from the start. The Commission fined TGP Europe £3.3 million after finding it had failed to carry out proper checks on the white-label partners trading under its licence, and on 15 May 2025 the company surrendered all four of its operating licences. The Commission’s own register page for account 38898 shows every licence as Surrendered with that date. The downloadable files do not say any of this — but the regulator published it, and a register that is silent is not the same as a fact that is unknown.

AG Communications LimitedAG — that is the spelling in the Commission’s own export, trailing letters and all — is a different case that looks identical in the data. Account 39483, 76 domains, every one Inactive, among them 24spin.com, alfobet.com, atlanticspins.com, bet442.co.uk. But this licensee has not surrendered: it still carries an active trading name. It has been fined twice — £237,600 in 2022, again over due diligence on white-label partners, and a further settlement over anti-money-laundering and social-responsibility failures. Same pattern in the domain file, entirely different regulatory position.

That is the caution this section is really about. Twelve licensees on the 29 August edition hold five or more domains apiece with no active one among them, and the register tells you nothing about why. One has left the market under enforcement; another is still licensed and trading. The download cannot distinguish them and neither can a checker that reads only the download — the Commission’s per-account pages and its enforcement notices can.

The practical consequence is still exact: a brand whose domain is marked Inactive is in the register and is not licensed to serve you today. “It’s in the register” is not the question. “What does the status say, and what has the regulator published about this licensee” is.

The group with no record at all

Then there is the category with nothing in any of the three files. Checked on 29 August 2026, each searched across 2,653 business accounts, 2,436 trading names and 2,243 domains:

Mostbet, 1xBet, Melbet, Betwinner, Megapari, 22bet, Linebet, BetAndreas, 1win, Pin-Up, 888Starz, Rabona, Roobet, Bitstarz, Cloudbet, Vave, 20bet, Fairspin, Sportaza, Rolletto, Ivibet, Nomini, Marathonbet, Leon — twenty-four brands, zero records between them.

This is worth stating plainly for anyone reading our licence findings on Mostbet: the absence of a Great Britain licence is not a peculiarity of that one operator. It is the normal condition of an entire category of offshore brands that market to British searchers. What follows from it is the same for all of them — no Commission complaints route, no Commission-approved dispute resolution, no GAMSTOP coverage, and no requirement to tell you how your deposit is held.

Checking a brand yourself, and the four ways it goes wrong

The register is a public download in three files — businesses, trading names and domains. Search all three, locally, and read the status column. Then avoid the traps, each of which we hit while building this page.

Substring matching invents licences

Searching for linebet as plain text matches onlinebetjem.com — onlinebetjem. Published without thought, that becomes the sentence “Linebet is licensed in Great Britain”, about a real company, and it is false. Searching for stake returns Stakelogic, Stakemate, DipStakes, Sweepstake Technologies and highstakes — twenty matches, none of them the brand being asked about. Match on whole words and on the domain’s own label, never on raw text.

One file is not the register

The bet365 case above. A brand absent from the businesses file may hold every licence it needs under a parent company’s name in the other two.

The businesses file does not say who is still licensed

It has two columns: account number and account name. No status, no dates. An account stays in it after the licence behind it has gone — TGP Europe surrendered all four of its licences on 15 May 2025 and is still listed in the file we downloaded on 29 August 2026.

So the count of rows in that file is a count of accounts, not of businesses currently licensed, and this page says “business accounts” for that reason. Current status lives in the Status column of the trading-name and domain files, and in full on the Commission’s own page for each account.

A negative needs a control

“We searched and found nothing” has two explanations and only one is about the brand. The other is that the search broke. Every nil result on this page was recorded only after a control search for a known licensee returned its expected matches in the same run. When the control fails, the method has failed and no result is recorded — the rule is set out in our methodology.

Common questions

What does “White Label” actually mean for me?

That the brand you are dealing with operates on another company’s operating licence. The other company is the licensee the Gambling Commission regulates, and it is who a complaint ultimately concerns, even though its name does not appear on the site you signed up to. It does not mean the site is unlicensed or that anything is wrong — it means accountability sits somewhere other than where the branding suggests, and it takes one register lookup to find out where.

Is a brand in the register automatically safe to use?

No, and this is the most common misreading. 807 of the 2,243 domains in the register are marked Inactive, meaning the record exists and the licence behind it does not currently cover that domain. One licensee has 76 domains in the register and every one of them is Inactive. Presence in the register is not the answer; the status against the entry is.

Why does searching for a brand return nothing when I know it is licensed?

Usually because you searched the businesses file only. Licences are frequently held in a parent or technical entity’s name — bet365’s under three Hillside entities, the Sky Bet trading names under SBG Sports Limited and Bonne Terre Gaming Limited, www.unibet.co.uk under Platinum Gaming Limited. The brand appears in the trading names and domains files instead. Search all three before concluding anything.

What is missing from an operator with no record at all?

Four things a Great Britain licence brings with it: a complaints route to the Gambling Commission, membership of a Commission-approved dispute resolution scheme, participation in GAMSTOP national self-exclusion, and a required statement of how customer funds are held if the company fails. An operator outside the register offers none of them, whatever its own terms may promise. The blocks that still work on such a site are on our responsible gambling page.

How current is this?

The Commission republishes the register daily. Every figure here comes from the edition dated 29 August 2026, and the counts move slightly day to day as licences are granted, surrendered and revoked. Anything quoted from this page should carry that date with it.

The data, and how to cite it

Every figure on this page comes from a snapshot we keep: the register edition
and its Last-Modified header, the size of all three files, the
control result, the status breakdown, all 34 white-label licensees with their
domain counts, and every licensee whose domains are all inactive.

Write to verify@mostbet-uk.net and we will send it to you. Tell us
roughly what you are doing with it, which is not a hurdle but the reason we do
it this way: these numbers move. Between 24 and 29 August the
white-label count went from 376 to 373, inactive records from 800 to 807, and a
thirty-fourth licensee appeared. Anyone who took a file silently would be
holding a stale figure and we would have no way to tell them. If we know you are
using it, we can.

Quote any figure with its edition date attached. A number from this page
without the date it was read is being misquoted, and that is the mistake this
whole page exists to argue against. If we later correct something you have
already republished, the correction is published with its
date so you can see exactly what changed.

You do not need us for the underlying material. The Commission publishes the
three files itself and the method is set out below — anyone can download them
and reach the same counts. What we hold is the working snapshot, dated, so you
do not have to.

Where these numbers come from

Three files, downloaded whole from the Gambling Commission and searched locally rather than through any website’s search box, so the check is reproducible by anyone:

• Business licence register — businesses, trading names and domain names (CSV)

Edition used: Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:30:28 GMT — 2,653 business accounts, 2,436 trading names, 2,243 domains. Control search: bet365 returned 0 businesses, 3 trading names and 2 domains, as expected, in the same run that produced every figure above.

We hold no commercial relationship with any brand named on this page, and name them because the register does. Nothing here is a recommendation to use any of them. If something on this page is wrong, tell us and we will publish the correction with its date.