How We Rate Online Casinos for Safety
Our ranking is built on what a player can verify from outside the company. Not on how a site looks, and not on how large its headline bonus number is.
What we score
- A complaints route that names something. The heaviest weight we apply. Terms that name an escalation stage, a deadline, or a body that receives the matter above the operator score here. A support widget does not. This is the only criterion that changes what happens after things go wrong.
- Terms stated with figures and a date. A published wagering multiple beats an absent one, and dated terms beat undated ones. An operator that states a match and omits the multiple is asking a reader to accept an offer they cannot price, and it costs them position here.
- Entry bar. The qualifying deposit, because it sets what a first test of an unfamiliar operator costs. Across our current lineup that runs from C$1 to C$45.
- Currency the offer is priced in. Real figures in the currency the operator publishes them in, dated when we captured them. Two brands on our list publish in euros and we leave them in euros.
- Honesty about limits. An operator that discloses a punishing wagering multiple scores better than one that omits a mild one.
What we do not score
- Payout speed. Untested by us, so unranked by us. Ranking on an untested figure would be inventing the thing readers most want to be true.
- Security graphics. A padlock and a page headed Security cost an operator nothing and prove nothing, so they earn nothing.
- Game counts. Trivially inflated, and unrelated to whether you are paid.
- Audit badges. We have no sourced audit evidence for these operators.
Where a rating comes from
The score attached to each brand is our editorial assessment across those five criteria. It is a judgement, not a measurement, and we would rather label it that way than dress it up as data. Where we could not verify something, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
When we revisit
Bonus terms and cashier menus change without notice, and licence regimes change with even less warning to players. We re-check the lineup's published terms on a rolling basis and date every figure on the page. If an operator's own terms disagree with what we show, the operator is right and we are out of date, so tell us at [email protected].