What is Licence Lookup?

A licence lookup is checking an operator's licensing claim in the regulator's own public register instead of trusting the badge in the footer. Every serious regulator publishes a searchable list of who it has licensed. The badge is an image on a page the operator controls, and an image can be copied; a register entry cannot. The lookup needs two things from the site: the licence number and the name of the company that holds it. The company is rarely the brand — it is named in the terms and conditions, usually in the first or last section — and searching the brand name alone is the most common reason a genuine licence appears to be missing. In the register, four things are worth reading: that the status is active rather than lapsed, suspended or surrendered; that the company name matches the one in the terms; that the licensed products cover what you intend to play; and, in registers that list them, that the domain you are on is one of the operator's declared domains. A mismatch is not automatically fraud — brands change hands and registers lag behind — but it does mean the claim is unverified rather than verified. Where the register returns nothing for either the number or the company, the honest conclusion is that the licence has not been demonstrated.