One licence, twenty-seven casinos
Most of the brands on this list are run by a single company under a single licence. What that means for your account, your money and your complaint.
Twenty-seven British casino sites. Different names, different artwork, different welcome pages. One company, and one licence, behind every single one.
Open the Gambling Commission's public register and search any of them by domain. Zodiac Casino, Luxury Casino, Yukon Gold, Captain Cook, Villento, Grand Mondial — all twenty-seven resolve to the same place: Apollo Entertainment Limited, account 38620, operating licence 038620-R-319310-013, a remote casino licence active since 1 November 2014.
This is not a secret and it is not improper. Multi-brand operation is ordinary in gambling, and running many front-ends off one licensed platform is cheaper than licensing each separately. But almost nobody tells you, and it changes four things that matter.
Your self-exclusion probably covers all of them
Under the Commission's licence conditions, an operator must let you self-exclude, and that exclusion applies across the brands it runs. Exclude yourself from one of these twenty-seven and you should find the other twenty-six closed to you too. If you have ever excluded from one site and been unsettled to find a similar-looking casino also refusing your sign-up, this is why.
Shared operator, shared obligation. The brand on the door is paint; the company behind the counter is the same.
One set of terms, one complaints route
Twenty-seven brands do not give you twenty-seven chances. If a dispute goes wrong at one, it goes to the same operator, under broadly the same terms, and ultimately to the same alternative-dispute-resolution provider. Shopping between these brands after a bad experience moves you sideways, not onwards.
Your verification is likely shared
Identity and source-of-funds checks are run by the operator, not the brand. Documents you have already submitted to one may satisfy another, and a block applied at one will tend to follow you.
Diversity on a list can be an illusion
This is the part that should make you sceptical of comparison sites, including the ones that look more polished than this one. A page listing ten casinos looks like ten choices. If eight of them run off one licence, it is really three. We publish the licensee and the account number on every entry precisely so you can see the overlap rather than take our word for the variety.
Check it yourself
You do not have to believe any of this. Go to the Gambling Commission's public register of gambling businesses, search a domain name, and read the licensee it returns. Do it for three of the brands on our list and the pattern will be obvious in about ninety seconds.