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Anjouan Casino License Explained – What It Protects and What It Doesn't
Anjouan Casino License Explained: What It Protects and What It Doesn't
An Anjouan casino licence is a low-cost offshore permit issued in the name of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan, part of the Union of the Comoros, and administered since May 2023 by a private company called Anjouan Licensing Services Inc. (ALSI) under the branding "Anjouan Gaming Authority." It costs roughly €17,000 to obtain, carries 0% tax on gross gaming revenue, and can be issued in two to four weeks. It gives you a named legal entity to hold responsible and a mandatory dispute-resolution route. It does not give you a regulator that will fight your corner, and the jurisdiction's legal standing is publicly disputed by the Comoros central bank.
That gap is the whole story. Here is the honest version.
What Anjouan Actually Is
Anjouan is one of three islands in the Union of the Comoros, in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar. It has issued offshore gaming permits since 2005, under two pieces of island-level legislation: the Computer Gaming Licensing Act 007 of 2005 and the Money Laundering (Prevention) Act 008 of 2005. Those acts name the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority (AOFA) as the supervising body.
For nearly two decades this was a footnote jurisdiction. A few hundred licences, almost no marketing surface, barely any review-site coverage. Today the register carries 1,449 licences as of our 22 July 2026 refresh, 1,301 of them B2C-capable.
The structure you will see referenced in casino footers has three layers:
- AOFA (Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority) – the statutory authority named in the 2005 acts, providing financial oversight.
- Anjouan Gaming Authority – the public-facing regulator brand, which runs the website, the public register and the rulebook.
- ALSI (Anjouan Licensing Services Inc.) – the entity that has handled day-to-day licence administration since May 2023, and whose initials appear in the licence numbers.
The Licence Number Format
Anjouan licence numbers follow a readable pattern: ALSI-YYYYMMNNN-FIx.
Take a real one we verified: ALSI-202505025-FI1, held by Bravo Entertainment Ltd. Read it left to right – ALSI is the administrator, 2025 is the year, 05 is the month, 025 is the sequence number for that month, and FI1 marks it as a B2C (player-facing) licence. FI2 denotes B2B. That single string tells you when the licence was issued, which is more than most offshore formats give you.
Our legitimacy check on Jackpotter walks that exact number through the register, including the wrinkle that matters most here: the record showed a status of "Valid" alongside a printed expiry date that had already passed. By September 2026 the same record showed a renewal through May 2027 – the renewal-lag pattern playing out exactly as the register data suggests.
Why the 2024–2026 Boom Happened
Anjouan's growth is almost entirely a Curaçao story.
On 24 December 2024, Curaçao's LOK law came into force and killed the 1993 master-licence model, where four master licensees sub-licensed thousands of operators with minimal oversight. Every operator suddenly had to apply directly to the renamed Curaçao Gaming Authority, with beneficial-owner checks, chain-analysis tooling and AML controls in the same broad league as Malta. Our breakdown of the Curaçao reform and its new CGA seals covers what changed and why.
The compliance bar went up, and the cost went up with it. Curaçao went from licensing well over 1,200 operators to a few hundred inside a year. A large share of the crypto-first segment did the arithmetic – six-figure first-year obligations in Curaçao versus €17,000 and no GGR tax in Anjouan – and moved.
The most visible single departure was BC.Game, which voluntarily surrendered its Curaçao licence on 5 December 2024, one day before the regulator was due to rule on its status, citing an increasingly hostile environment. It relicensed in Anjouan.
The register's year-of-issue distribution shows the migration cleanly. These are the active brands we mapped in our full Anjouan operator database:
| Licence issue year | Active brands | Accept any crypto |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 146 | 82.9% |
| 2024 | 643 | 78.4% |
| 2025 | 774 | 76.4% |
| 2026 (to 22 July) | 188 | 70.2% |
The 2024 cohort is roughly four times the 2023 baseline, and 2025 ran higher still. Through 2026 the register has been adding around 47 new B2C licences a month. That is the post-LOK exodus, showing up as licence volume.
What an Anjouan Licence Costs an Operator
The fee schedule matters to you because it tells you how much the operator has at stake if they lose the licence. Not much, as it turns out.
| Item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Application (initial licence) | €17,000 |
| Annual renewal | €13,300 |
| Annual compliance / due diligence | €1,700 |
| Key person authorisation (annual) | €2,000 |
| Each additional domain | €500 |
| B2B licence recognition | €9,500 |
| Tax on gross gaming revenue | 0% |
Compare that to a Malta B2C licence, where the application, compliance contribution, gaming tax and local-substance requirements run into six figures a year before you have paid a single salary. An MGA licensee that loses its licence loses a business asset it spent years and serious money building. An Anjouan licensee loses a €13,300 annual renewal and can, in practice, be back under a different corporate entity in weeks.
That asymmetry is the single most useful thing to understand about offshore licensing. Enforcement bites when the licence is expensive to replace.
What It Does Protect
It is lazy to write Anjouan off as meaningless. The framework has real components, and they have tightened since 2025.
A named, identifiable licensee. The public register lists the company name, licence number, type, issue date, expiry date and every domain covered. That gives you a legal entity to name in a complaint, a chargeback claim or a letter from a lawyer. An unlicensed casino gives you a brand name and a support email.
Mandatory ADR participation. Every licensee must sign up to an approved Alternative Dispute Resolution provider, and the operator bears the cost. As of August 2026, the approved list names four: EGIS ADR (Dubai), Axion ADR (Nevis), iGaming ADR (Isle of Man) and CADRE B.V. (Curaçao). Free to the player in every case.
Published complaint timers. The operator must respond to a complaint within 30 calendar days. Game-outcome disputes must be raised within 14 calendar days of the session; account disputes – payments, suspensions, bonus decisions – within 30 calendar days. Escalating to ADR before the operator's 30 days expire gets your complaint bounced.
AML and due-diligence obligations on paper. Documented AML programmes, beneficial-owner checks, RNG certification requirements and quarterly compliance reporting (Q1 2026 reports were due by 30 April 2026).
Some visible enforcement. The Authority announced a licence suspension on 10 February 2026 and published a revised Certificate Verification Framework on 24 February 2026, effective 1 April 2026. It is thin compared with the MGA's published penalty record, but it is not zero.
An Anjouan licence buys you traceability and a free, mandatory complaints channel. That is genuinely more than nothing. What it does not buy you is a regulator that will recover your money.
What It Does Not Protect
Here is where you need to be clear-eyed.
The Authority will not touch your complaint. This is not an inference – it is the Authority's own published policy. It states that it does not handle, mediate or adjudicate player complaints, that disputes are the responsibility of the operator and an approved ADR provider, and that it "will not correspond with players on the merits of individual complaints." Compare that with the MGA's Player Support Unit or the ADR system UKGC licensees must fund. In Anjouan, the regulator is a registry and a rulebook, not a backstop.
No segregated-funds guarantee you can rely on. There is no equivalent of a published, audited player-funds protection rating. If the operating company fails, you are an unsecured creditor of an offshore shell.
No consumer-law backstop. Malta sits inside the EU. Great Britain has the Consumer Rights Act and a court system that will hear you. Anjouan gives you a paper trail and a contract governed by a jurisdiction you will not realistically litigate in. To see what that backstop does in Britain, look at how two High Court cases dealt with glitch-voided jackpots.
Renewal hygiene is poor. At our July 2026 refresh, 251 B2C register entries were sitting past their printed expiry date while still displaying as valid. That is not a handful of stragglers – it is roughly one in five B2C records. It means a register hit alone does not prove the licence is current.
Restricted markets are contractual, not enforced. The licence does not authorise operation in the USA, UK, France, Spain, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Australia, the Comoros itself, or FATF-blacklisted countries. Plenty of Anjouan brands accept traffic from those markets anyway, and every one of them reserves the right to void winnings when they detect it. When Japan asked Anjouan to cut off Japanese players in June 2025, we re-crawled the register and found 77 licensed brands still running Japanese-language casino interfaces.
The Legitimacy Question Nobody in the Industry Wants to Answer
This is the part most Anjouan explainers skip, and you should not.
The Central Bank of the Comoros issued a communiqué in June 2022 naming AOFA and the neighbouring Mwali International Services Authority as fictitious structures with no legal or physical existence in the country, issuing licences it says they have no authority to issue. That communiqué was re-published as a reminder in December 2025. The central bank's position rests on Comorian constitutional law – financial and banking legislation is reserved to the Union government, not the individual islands, under Organic Law No. 05-003/AU of 1 March 2005. An IMF report in 2010 (No. 10/320) reached a similar conclusion, finding the offshore institutions were created in violation of Union law.
There is more recent pressure. An Australian investigation published in December 2025 described an Anjouan-linked network selling gambling and financial licences. The Irish Examiner ran the same thread on 28 March 2026, reporting that Anjouan-branded sites were targeting Irish users under permits the Comoros central bank considers invalid. FATF's 2024 mutual evaluation materials for the Comoros noted that gambling is prohibited under the Comorian Penal Code at union level.
The counter-argument from the licensing side is that Anjouan is an autonomous island with its own 2005 gaming legislation and its own competence over gaming, which is not banking. The relationship between island-level and union-level authority genuinely has not been settled by any court.
How to Verify an Anjouan Licence
Six steps, ten minutes, and it beats reading a hundred affiliate reviews. The general method is the same across regulators – our walkthrough on verifying any casino licence yourself covers UKGC, MGA and the rest.
- Find the seal in the footer. Licensed sites carry a validator seal. Click it. It should resolve to a live certificate, not a dead link or a static image.
- Go to the register directly. Type
anjouangaming.cominto the address bar yourself. Do not follow the casino's link and do not trust a search result – lookalike "Anjouan gaming board" and "gaming control Anjouan" domains exist and are not the official register. - Search by domain, not by brand. The register lists every domain a licence covers. Search the exact domain you are about to deposit on. A brand name matching is not enough; the specific URL has to appear.
- Read the licence number. Confirm the ALSI-YYYYMMNNN-FIx format and check that FI1 (B2C) appears for a player-facing casino. An FI2 number on a casino front end means someone has pasted a supplier licence where an operator licence should be.
- Check the expiry date, not just the status. This is the step almost everyone skips. Roughly one in five B2C records shows "Valid" next to a date that has already passed. If the expiry is in the past, treat the licence as unconfirmed regardless of what the status column says.
- Match the licensee to the T&Cs. The company on the register should be the company in the site's terms and conditions and on the payment descriptor. A mismatch means the money is going somewhere the licence does not cover.
Red Flags Specific to Anjouan Sites
- A static seal image that links nowhere. The most common tell on any offshore site.
- A licence number that does not resolve on the register, or resolves to a different domain than the one you are on.
- Expiry date in the past, status "Valid." Common enough that you must check for it.
- The T&C entity differs from the register entity. Especially when the terms name a Belize, Costa Rica or Seychelles company that never appears on the licence record.
- A brand that geo-accepts a restricted market – UK, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, USA – while holding an Anjouan licence. The terms will say you were playing outside the licence when you try to withdraw.
- No ADR provider named anywhere on the site. Participation is mandatory, so refusing to name the provider is a deliberate omission.
- Cloned register domains. If the "register" you landed on is not anjouangaming.com, you are looking at a fake.
So Should You Play at an Anjouan Casino?
Our position, unchanged since we started scoring it: Anjouan is a Tier 2.5 jurisdiction and we score it 3/10 on trust and licensing. Our tier-by-tier breakdown of what each licence means puts it in context against UKGC, MGA and post-reform Curaçao.
That does not make every Anjouan casino a scam. The register is real, the ADR requirement is real and free, and plenty of good crypto product runs on Anjouan paper because the operators wanted a cheap licence, not because they wanted to steal from you.
What it means is that the licence should carry almost no weight in your decision. Judge the operator on what you can actually check: how long the brand has existed, whether withdrawal complaints cluster around a specific threshold, whether the terms cap wins on bonuses, and whether support answers negative public reviews.
Bottom line: treat an Anjouan licence as a traceability record, not a safety guarantee. Verify the domain in the register, check the expiry date, note the ADR provider before you deposit rather than after, and never put more on the site than you would be willing to argue about with a mediator in Dubai.
FAQ
Is an Anjouan casino licence legitimate?
It is real in the sense that a register, a rulebook, an ADR framework and a licensing office all exist and function. Its legal foundation is disputed – the Central Bank of the Comoros has stated since a June 2022 communiqué, re-published in December 2025, that the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority has no legal existence and no authority to issue licences, and an IMF report in 2010 reached a similar conclusion. No court has settled the question. Treat the licence as a traceability record, not proof of oversight.
How do I check if an Anjouan licence is valid?
Go to anjouangaming.com yourself rather than following the casino's link, open the licence register, and search for the exact domain you plan to deposit on. Confirm the ALSI-YYYYMMNNN-FI1 number format for a B2C casino, check that the licensee company matches the entity in the site's terms, and check the expiry date rather than just the status column – roughly one in five B2C records shows "Valid" next to an expiry that has already passed.
Can I complain to the Anjouan regulator if a casino won't pay me?
No. The Authority's own published policy states that it does not handle, mediate or adjudicate player complaints and will not correspond with players on the merits of individual cases. Your route is the operator's internal complaints process first, which must answer within 30 calendar days, then a free escalation to one of the four approved ADR providers – EGIS ADR, Axion ADR, iGaming ADR or CADRE B.V. – which the operator has to pay for.
Why did so many casinos switch from Curaçao to Anjouan?
Cost and speed. Curaçao's LOK law took effect on 24 December 2024, ended the master-licence model and forced direct licensing with real AML and beneficial-owner requirements. Curaçao's licensee count collapsed from over 1,200 to a few hundred in a year. Anjouan offered a €17,000 licence, 0% tax on gaming revenue and a two-to-four-week turnaround, so the crypto-first segment migrated. BC.Game surrendering its Curaçao licence on 5 December 2024 was the most visible example.
Is an Anjouan licence as good as MGA or UKGC?
Not close. MGA and UKGC operators face six-figure annual costs, published enforcement records, audited player-fund requirements and a regulator or funded ADR system that will actually take up your case. An Anjouan licensee pays €13,300 a year to renew and faces a regulator that explicitly declines to intervene in player disputes. The practical gap shows up when something goes wrong, not when everything works.
Are Anjouan casinos legal to play at from the UK or Germany?
The licence does not authorise operation in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, the USA or the Comoros itself. Some sites accept the traffic anyway, but every set of terms reserves the right to void winnings on play from a restricted country. If you live in a regulated market, the enforceable route is a locally licensed operator – you will have real recourse there and none on an offshore site that was never supposed to take your deposit.