Licences and Regulators

The short version: this site is a publisher, not a gambling business. The longer version matters, because “licensed” gets used loosely in this industry and the distinction decides who is responsible for what.

What Art Weekender is, in regulatory terms

• We do not accept bets, wagers or stakes of any kind.
• We do not hold, transfer or process player funds.
• We do not operate, host or white-label any gambling software.
• We hold no gambling licence in any jurisdiction, because publishing explanatory articles does not require one.
• We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for any regulator or testing house named on this site.

If you have a dispute about a deposit, a withdrawal, a bonus term or a closed account, we cannot resolve it and cannot escalate it. That has to go to the operator’s own complaints process first, and then to the regulator that issued its licence or to the alternative dispute resolution body named in the operator’s terms.

Your responsibility, not ours

Online gambling is legal in some places, restricted in others and prohibited in the rest, and the rules differ by state and province as well as by country. Whether you may lawfully open an account is a question about where you are, not about what you read here. Check it before you sign up.

What we look at when an article discusses licensing

When an article touches an operator’s regulatory position, these are the registers it is checked against — public, searchable, and maintained by the regulator itself rather than by the operator:

• UK Gambling Commission — the public register of licensed operators, plus the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice, which is where the technical and security requirements actually live.
• Malta Gaming Authority — the licensee register and the MGA’s technical requirements for remote gaming systems.
• Curaçao Gaming Authority — the regulator created by the 2023 reform of the old master-licence system, which now issues and lists licences directly.
• Regulators in regulated US states — each licensing state maintains its own list of permitted operators; a licence in one state says nothing about another.

Two things we check on a register that are easy to skip: whether the licence is current rather than merely listed, and whether the licensed legal entity is the one actually running the site you are on. A brand and its licensee are often different names, and a licence granted to a parent company does not automatically cover a subsidiary’s product.

Certification is not licensing

A logo from a testing house on a footer is not a licence, and a licence is not a testing certificate. They answer different questions: the regulator says the company may operate, the testing house says a specific piece of software passed a specific test at a specific time. Neither is a guarantee that your account is secure today. What each one covers, and how to check whether it is still valid, is the subject of the Audits & Certification section.

Compliance of this website

Our own obligations are the ordinary ones for a publisher: honest disclosure of commercial links, set out on Funding and Links; lawful handling of the little personal data this site touches, described on Privacy and Cookies; and the terms on which the site is offered, on Terms of Use.

If you believe something published here misstates a regulator’s position or an operator’s licensing status, tell us and we will check it against the register: Fixing Mistakes.