By the BonusWithoutDeposit editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · How we review
One of the questions that a new player asks most often concerns the safety of online casinos, and it deserves, in our view, an orderly answer, because "safety" means several things at once: the safety of the money deposited, of the personal and payment data entered at registration, and of the games themselves, which must be fair. Part of this safety depends on the casino (the "server side", as it is called), and part depends on the player and on the device from which he or she plays (the "client side"); both deserve attention, but the first question comes before everything else.
That first question, as we never tire of repeating, is the licence. A casino licensed by a serious regulator has, in practice, already been checked on most of the points that worry a player (where the money is kept, how the games are tested, what happens in a dispute), and verifying the licence takes less time than reading a welcome offer!
Every licensed casino publishes, normally at the foot of its pages (the so-called "footer"), the name of the company that runs it, the regulator that issued the licence and the licence number. The check consists in looking for that number on the public register of the regulator, which is free and open to anyone. Betway, to take an example from our own pages, declares the Maltese licence MGA/B2C/130/2006 and the British "account" 39372, and both can be found in a few seconds on the registers of the Malta Gaming Authority and of the Gambling Commission.
The registers that matter most for our readers are those of Malta and of the United Kingdom, followed by those of Gibraltar, of the Isle of Man and of Alderney, which are smaller but respected "jurisdictions" (the term the sector uses for regulators and their territories). Curaçao, which issues the most common "offshore" licences, has reformed its system in recent years, replacing the old "sublicences" granted under a few "master licences" with licences issued directly by its regulator, and a casino that claims a licence but does not appear on the register of the authority it names should be avoided, without exceptions.
The licences of the strictest regulators (Malta and the United Kingdom above all) oblige the operator to keep the players' money separate from its own, so that a failure of the company does not take the balances with it, to have its games tested by independent "laboratories" (the testing houses), to verify the identity and the age of its players, and to offer the tools of "responsible gambling" (deposit limits, pauses, self-exclusion). They also give the player a route for complaints that does not end with the operator: an independent adjudication service, and then the regulator itself.
The offshore licences offer much less on each of these points, and that is why our pages treat them differently. At a casino licensed in Curaçao the free bonus can be claimed without risk, since nothing of one's own is at stake; real deposits, in our view, belong to the casinos with a strong licence.
On its own side, a serious casino protects the connection with "encryption" (the "padlock" in the browser's address bar shows that the data travel encrypted), entrusts the payments to recognised "processors" (the companies that handle the transactions), and asks for the identity documents (the "KYC") that the rules against money laundering require before the first withdrawal. The request for documents is sometimes perceived as a nuisance. It is, on the contrary, a sign that the casino applies the rules, and a casino that pays large sums without asking anything is the one that should worry you.
The part of safety that depends on the player is the most neglected, and the simplest to look after! The device from which you play should have an updated operating system and a reliable antivirus, since a "trojan" (a program that hides itself in order to steal data) is far more dangerous on a computer used for payments than anywhere else. Passwords should never be saved in the files of the computer, any more than the PIN of a card should be kept in one's wallet, and the "two-step verification" that many casinos offer is worth activating at once.
Two further habits, which we follow ourselves, complete the picture: payments are better made from a private connection rather than from a public network (the free wi-fi of a station or of a bar), and whoever has doubts about the safety of his or her own device can use a prepaid card or an electronic wallet, which limits the damage of any theft to the amount loaded on it.
Each country decides which licences it recognises, and the same casino can be authorised in one market and prohibited in another. The operators listed on our pages address the international, non-regulated market, and it is the player's responsibility to check, before registering, what the law of the country in which he or she is located allows; our guide to the British licence describes, as an example, how far a regulated market can go.
Find the licence number at the foot of the casino's pages and look it up on the public register of the regulator that issued it, and if it is not there, avoid the casino.
Those of the strictest regulators, Malta and the United Kingdom above all, followed by Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and Alderney. Offshore licences, such as Curaçao, offer much less.
Because the rules against money laundering oblige licensed operators to verify the identity and the age of their players before paying a withdrawal.
Keep your device updated and protected, never save passwords on it, activate two-step verification, avoid public networks, and consider a prepaid card or an electronic wallet.
A safe casino is, before anything else, a casino with a licence that can be checked, and the check takes five minutes on the register of the regulator. The rest (the encryption, the payments, the documents, the care of one's own device) follows from that first step, which is the cheapest protection available to a player and the one most often skipped. 18+, and gambling should remain entertainment.