A method is only useful if it produces the same result in someone else's hands. This page describes ours in enough detail for a reader to repeat it, and marks the places where repetition will fail because the information simply is not public.
The order of work
- Collect the claims. We read everything the brand publishes about itself: the landing pages, the terms if any exist, the frequently asked questions, the footer. Claims are recorded as claims, with the framing kept visible in the finished text.
- Look for a legal entity. A company name, a registration number, a jurisdiction, an address. Anything that identifies a party to an agreement.
- Search public registers. Where a name or a number exists, we search the relevant company register and the regulator's public database for the jurisdiction named.
- Test the licence claim. A claim is testable only with three fields: the authority, the reference number and the exact legal name. We check what the authorisation covers, not only that a record exists.
- Trace the money path. Deposit methods, stated withdrawal terms, any named payment processor, any custody statement.
- Record what is missing. Everything that could not be confirmed goes into the unverified list of the verdict, in the reader's language rather than ours.
Sources
Public company registers and regulators' own databases and warning lists are the backbone. Beyond them we use the platform's own published material, the public app stores where an application genuinely exists, and archived copies of pages where the current version has changed. Anything else is treated as hearsay.
Search results, forum posts, video reviews and affiliate blogs are not sources. They are frequently the same marketing text passed through several hands, and treating them as evidence is exactly how an invented minimum deposit becomes a fact repeated across a hundred pages.
What the statuses mean
Unverified. No operating company, custody arrangement or licence could be confirmed at the date of the check. This is the default and the most common result. It is a statement about the available evidence, not an accusation.
High risk. Specific verifiable facts point to serious hazard for a user, and each of those facts is named in the entry.
Avoid. A published warning or enforcement action from a named authority, which we have read, names the platform or an entity we could match to it. We quote the source and the date in the entry itself.
No red flags found. Custody, entity and authorisation questions were answered, and the answers held up against the register. Rare in this part of the market.
A status never rests on tone, popularity, design quality or the volume of complaints we happened to see. Those things are noise, and a register built on them would be a register of how loudly people complain.
Where we stop
We do not telephone support lines to test response times, because a single call proves nothing and is trivially staged. We do not open accounts and deposit money to observe a withdrawal, because financing a platform in order to review it corrupts both the finances and the review. We do not publish screenshots of correspondence sent to us privately without permission.
And we do not fill gaps. If the jurisdiction of an operator is unknown, the entry says the jurisdiction is unknown. A plausible guess is indistinguishable from a fact once it is printed, and the reader has no way to tell them apart.
Rechecks and corrections
Every entry carries a checked date, which is the only date that matters for a claim about the present. Entries are rechecked when a brand changes its published material, when a register record appears, or on the desk's own schedule.
Corrections are welcome from anyone, including the platforms we write about. Send the evidence and we will act on evidence: a register link, a company number, a licence reference, a document. We correct the entry, note what changed, and update the checked date. We do not remove an entry because a subject dislikes the verdict, and we do not publish a change on the basis of an assertion alone. The contact page explains where to send it.