Same Reliably Mediocre Authority, New Look.
I first noticed issues with the certificate links a couple of weeks ago where they would not resolve, take a long time or seemingly be down. A few days later they were completely down across the board for the entire day. When I woke up the next morning the links were now working but all redirecting to cert.cga.cw from cert.gcb.cw. This indicated that they were moving away from the Gaming Control Board branding and opting for the more authoritative option of using the actual authority in the seals. With each new day i started to wonder when/if they would replace the seals to fall in line with the new url.
I didn't check any certificates for the last week or so but I was very pleasantly surprised to see, after checking one today, an updated appearance that is cleaner and space efficient.
Orange "Pending Licence" Certificates are finally no more
One of the things that, for me, was very annoying to track early on with Curacao, was the vast number of casinos with orange seals. They were not on any licence register and I had to manually find them from search engine indexing, brute force and happenstance. Time has allowed the CGA to catch up with their backlog and there were a fraction of them left with most applicants either receiving a licence, having it suspended or withdrawing it to take one elsewhere.
The state of play now is finally something simple. If its on the register PDF, its licenced. If it isn't its not. The orange seal was always intended to be a transitionary vehicle for continuity and it had far outstayed its welcome. It appears any new applicants won't have any sort of licence/seal until their application has been approved.
A licence can be revoked, suspended or withdrawn. These should be stated in the licence register and/or enforcement register. For the time being it is unclear which carries the most negative weight. Revoked tends to be mostly used for non-renewals, in addition to enforcement actions by the authority (early revocation to rabidi for example). Suspended and withdrawn are very similar but they are both statuses that happen due to a licence ending before it's intended expiration. Suspended is when the decision is made (seemingly by the licensee) and withdrawn is when it has been finalised.
All Important Seals To Look Out For
Green is good obviously. I haven't seen a blue yet but it might appear on a B2B platform website soon (still using green). There has been a long time issue with the seal colour not catching up to status. As can be seen with Throne Entertainment. I believe that the only orange seals will be those that havent caught up rather than ones indicating a pending licence. Grey is invalid/fake. It appears that casinos who make fake certificate links by copying the HTML/CSS (entire page) of a real licence page and only replacing a few words will have their seals go grey as it detects this and uses a different subdomain (portalimgrn instead of portalimg) with the token saying "FAke=" at the end which is a nice nerdy touch.
There's still lots of typos and other issues with the PDF but hopefully with changes happening they might do their licence register more professionally.
