Most casino review sites in this market repeat what the operator publishes about itself. We do not. Every licensing claim on this site is checked against the issuing regulator's own register, and we publish the date we checked it so you can repeat the check yourself. This page explains exactly how that works, including where our method has limits.
The five things we score
Each brand is scored from 0 to 10 across five dimensions: trust and licensing, games, payments, bonuses, and support. The overall score is the average of the dimensions we have actually researched. If we have only completed the licensing work, the review says so and the score reflects only that. We would rather show an incomplete score than a confident-looking number built on nothing.
How we verify a licence
A licence number printed in a website footer proves nothing on its own. Our process is:
- Find the claim. We read the operator's own pages for the licence number and the authority named.
- Search the issuing register. We search the regulator's public register directly, not a third-party summary.
- Check the licence names the brand. A search hit is not a match. We confirm the licence actually lists the brand's own domains.
- Compare against the domain you will land on. Operators often route players in different countries to different domains. We check whether the domain Malaysian players actually reach is on the licence.
- Read the status with the expiry date. A status label alone is not enough, for reasons explained below.
- Record the date. Every finding is published with the date it was checked.
Two traps we found, and now check for every time
Near-miss search results. Searching one register for “m88” returns a company whose listed domains include boom888.com. That string contains “m88” by coincidence and the record has nothing to do with the M88 brand. Presented carelessly, it would look like verification. This is why step three exists.
Status labels that outlive the licence. We found a register entry showing the status “valid” on a licence whose expiry date had already passed. A status field is a label, not a guarantee. We always read it together with the expiry date, and we flag any licence expiring soon as a risk in the review itself.
What we do not claim
We do not currently deposit real money at the operators we review. Where a figure comes from the operator rather than from our own measurement, we label it as an operator claim. You will not find a payout time on this site presented as measured unless we measured it.
We also do not treat the absence of a licence in one register as proof that a brand is unlicensed. An operator may hold a licence from another jurisdiction. What we say instead is precisely what is true: we could not confirm who is licensed to hold your money.
How commercial arrangements are handled
We earn affiliate commissions when players sign up through some of our links. That arrangement never affects a score, a research finding, or whether a brand appears on our Caution List. Where a brand is flagged for caution, promotional links to it are suppressed across the entire site automatically, by code rather than by editorial discretion.
Corrections
If an operator can show us a licence in an issuing register that names its own domains, we re-check, update the review, and note the change with its date. Nothing is removed quietly. No operator can pay to change a score, to be delisted, or to have a finding withdrawn.
Gambling responsibly
Gambling involves real financial risk and can become a serious problem. If it is affecting your life, free confidential support is available at Gambling Therapy, which operates worldwide including Malaysia. Nothing on this site is a recommendation to gamble.