A gander into an Anjouan wilderness

[mulven]

With many casinos running away from Curacao to jurisdictions such as Anjouan or Costa Rica, I thought it would be nice to be able to back up calling it a crappy licence with some facts (if you can call them that).

Over the weekend I had a look into every single entry into the Anjouan Licence Register. I had originally parsed he list back in october and upon doing so again found there to be an increase of 485 to 512 entries with a further 4 (up to 516) added whilst I was doing this. 32 new entries and 1 removed entry (Vavada, who have a pending GCB licence).

The results, were as most would expect, overwhelmingly bad. I used a mixture of subjective and, where possible, objective reasoning to discern an opinion of each licensee. With each refining of the data things get worse. First we remove the dead/non-functional entries, then we remove the licensees that hold a superior licence in another jurisdiction, such as Kahnawake, Curacao, Malta or others. More than half of the "Good" sites had a better licence and we are left with 4.2% or 15 entries. Furthermore six of these were niche crypto games, lotteries or poker sites leaving only 9 "good" licensees that didn't hold superior licences. Two highlights would be Entsoft Group (Legend Affiliates) and Tech Zone Inc (Anden Online hiding behind another name).

The majority of "Bad" entries were casinos/sportsbooks with little or no footprint, reviews or any real information about them. "Meh" entries were considered to have a mixture of good and bad qualities and/or not clearing the bar for safety/quality as a "Good" entry. It's entirely possible for some of the "Bad" entries with no information, reviews or footprint to be legitimate but I would never risk my money on any of them unless they gained a positive reputation in the future.

For the sake of comparison, below is the breakdown of other jurisdictions. Curacao would be a useful comparison however unfortunately I am currently in the middle of doing the same process for that so do not have the finished chart for that yet. Once again, showing with and without dead entries.

As you can see, markedly different with the majority being positive in all cases with few or no "bad" entries.

Not that anyone actually needed confirmation of the fact the anjouan licence is a place for (mostly) garbage companies but who doesn't like a chart or two.

Final chart showing the amount of sites under each licence. Antigua (4 licensees) is not shown due to being to small to appear properly. I have not gathered data for insular authorities such as Sweden, Norway, UKGC etc. Brasil will soon have its own Authority starting in 2025 as they regulate their market. I found many of sites

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for the transition, on the anjouan register so I expect those to disappear from the Anjouan register eventually.

 

[Avernite]

A very informative and detailed post. Thank you for putting this out there

 

[jasonuk]

That's really interesting, even with the limitations of opinion it somewhat confirms the gut feelings / experience we've had regarding these licenses over recent years.

It also hints at the migration somewhat:

• IOM and Alderney licenses were big 10-20 years ago but a lot have moved to MGA (arguably a weaker jurisdiction);
• more recently some of those at MGA are starting to move to regional markets (such as the UKGC) or to the wilderness of the high seas (such as Curacao and beyond);
• likewise Curacao are now migrating to tinpot jurisdictions which will rubberstamp anything with a pulse - and back in some cases with the CGCB... although with the UK, France and US exclusions I'd expect more dual-licensing shenanigans going forward.

With the rapid expansion of multi-licensed sites, players will need to be on their toes much more... particularly when affiliates are promoting a stronger license, but the player is actually playing under a weaker license - reminded of the example of an "MGA-licensed" site that was accepting bets in Curacao, the MGA license existed but wasn't being used, and affiliates jumped all over that to mislead players - with the predictable outcome when players were being fleeced.

 

[maxd]

Wow, very impressive work @mulven , thank you for sharing all that.

My own experience from the complaints side of things supports the same conclusion. We’re seeing a disproportionate number of complaints against Anjouan-licensed properties and I don’t think we’ve seen a single case yet where the casino has been brought to heel by the Anjouan licensing “authorities”. So for we’ve seen maybe a dozen cases be referred to them and the response to both us and players complaining directly to them is a stony silence, no action whatsoever. For all intents and purposes thus far Anjouan is the new Costa Rica.

- Max

 

[Webzcas]

Great breakdown and many thanks for sharing.

 

[mulven]

With the rapid expansion of multi-licensed sites, players will need to be on their toes much more... particularly when affiliates are promoting a stronger license, but the player is actually playing under a weaker license - reminded of the example of an "MGA-licensed" site that was accepting bets in Curacao.

Agreed, saw quite a few examples of companies licencing a country specific url in anjouan, as well as lots of the previously referenced dual licence shenanigans across multiple platforms and brands.

There were some posts recently about some dodgy sites that were doing the UK switcharoo in which no licence or a costa rica licence was mentioned but from other countries, their Curacao licence was displayed. I have found at least eighteen sites total (other than the Manila/Uno Digital Media ones) that use the same platform as the ones from those posts. Most of these also have GCB/CIL licences, most of them also appear on the Anjouan register and probably at least half of them do the UK switcharoo where the superior licence is hidden. In some cases even the anjouan licence is the one that gets swapped out for nothing. Some block UK IPs whilst others on the same licence entry do not.

An example of this is Investan N.V. They have four sites; jokabet, f7, fridaywave and jackpotrover. The latter two block UK IPs but the first two are open season. I know that F7 Casino specifically advertises to UK players as I have had a pop-up ad on my phone once when I was trying to download something.

One of the main problems I ran into whilst doing this was discerning the footprint/reputation of website that were not in english markets. There would be sites that look invisible at the usual places to check but would turn out to be huge. After completing the list, but prior to posting, I found out about reclameaqui which appears to be where brasilians deal with their issues and review sites so I managed to re-rate as many sites as I could but I'm sure I missed a few.

Whilst I will be continuing to maintain the list, and others, on my main licence sheet I don't want to link to an active resource off-site from CM so will be inserting a static sheet with the data at the time of posting, that will not be updated. Some of the opinions I put may be disagreed with but usually had an optimistic outlook where possible so if anything, the "consensus" based results could look even worse for Anjouan.

 

[mulven]

In just a week since posting this, 29 new licensees have been added and 3 have been removed. Casinos are definitely flocking to Anjouan "licences", no doubt about that.

In this batch there is a bunch of okay crypto casinos, unlaunched websites, and a few "Next For You" sites that collectively are licenced by the GCB but are being separately registered on the Anjouan register.

An addition to highlight is ybets casino (f.k.a. inmerion) who were recently reviewed as part of Gentoo pushing more affiliate reviews. I highlight this as this will likely be the path that other PAGCOR licensees follow as all offshore Philippines licences cease at the end of the month.

A few lowlights would be:

• bloxgame.com - A roblox robux gambling website. Yes you read that right. Will turn some kids into gambling addicts undoubtedly. Can withdraw crypto.
• solama.com - A solana meme coin launched their own casino. Not much of a footprint apart from a bitcointalk thread accusing them of scamming them out of 5600$.

The three licensees that were removed from the register were nothing of note; a crap metaverse thing, a dead group of websites and a casino with no footprint.