What a Ksa licence means

What the Kansspelautoriteit actually grants

The licence is a decision made on application. The applicant is a legal entity with a registered office and a board; the decision records who that holder is, which type of gambling it may offer, and under which number the licence is registered. That number is the key to the whole check: it links a brand you see online to a party that can be held accountable.

A decision is not a snapshot that stays fixed afterward. The regulator monitors compliance, can impose conditions, and can end a licence. The question is therefore never only whether an operator was ever granted a licence, but also whether that licence is still standing today.

Which obligations attach to a licence

The licence is a package of duties. The main ones you notice directly as a player, before you have staked anything:

• connection to CRUKS, with a check of that register before you can play;
• identification and age verification upfront, in practice usually through iDIN;
• the ability to set your own limits, plus the operator's duty to respond to signs of risky play;
• withholding of gambling tax on your winnings, so that you do not have to file it yourself;
• being bound by Dutch advertising rules and by the Kansspelautoriteit's oversight, with the powers that come with it.

Operators carry out these duties better or worse, and that difference is what a review can describe. None of these duties is optional.

How you check it in the public register

The Kansspelautoriteit keeps a public overview of licence holders, the Kansspelwijzer. There you search by the holder's name or by the licence number, and you see the current status of the licence. It is the one checkpoint that does not come from the operator itself.

Three things commonly go wrong here. You search for the brand name instead of the holder and find nothing, which establishes nothing. You read a licence number on the operator's own site and take it at face value — which means checking the operator against its own claim. Or you find a holder with a similar name and assume it is the same party. Compare both name and number, and treat what is stated on the site as something still to be confirmed.

Brand name and licence holder are rarely the same

The brand from an advertisement is a trading name; the licence sits with the legal entity behind it. Kansino operates under the licence of Play North Limited, licence number 1653; JACKS.NL under that of JOI Gaming Limited, licence number 1959. Searching the register by the brand name will not get you there.

For our other listed operators, we have not independently verified a licence number and holder name ourselves. In those cases we leave that field blank. A number we have not checked ourselves is worthless to you, because you cannot tell it apart from an invented one. A blank field with us therefore does not mean an operator has no licence — it means we have not verified the number.

What a licence does not guarantee

The licence sets the framework, not the outcome of the game. Casino games are structured so that the operator wins over the long run; a licence changes nothing about that. What it does change is who you can hold accountable if something goes wrong, and what protection has to be in place by default.

Nor does it say anything about service. Payout speed, the quality of customer support and how readable bonus terms are differ by operator and by period. How we weigh that is set out in our method: a figure without a method is an opinion with decimal places.

What you are missing without a Dutch licence

We do not name operators without a Dutch licence, not even with a warning attached. What is missing with such offerings can still be described. There is no connection to CRUKS, so an exclusion you arranged for your own protection does not work there. There is no Dutch regulator to handle a complaint. And gambling tax is not withheld, which shifts the filing obligation to you.

That last point is the one most often underestimated. It is not a matter of principle but an obligation with your name on it, and it remains regardless of whether the operator later turns out to be unreachable.

A licence can change or lapse

The status in the register is today's status, not the status from the day the licence was granted. The Kansspelautoriteit can take measures following a breach, up to and including ending the licence. Which measure fits which breach is set out in the law and in the decision itself; we do not infer that from reporting, and we do not add our own estimate to it.

The practical consequence: check again if time has passed, particularly before you transfer money. Changes to the register of licence holders are reported in our news section, with a link to the decision where one is available.