Check your bookmaker on the regulator's own register
Every betting site says it is licensed. The claim is free to make and takes about a minute to check, because the regulators in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and South Africa all publish the list themselves. This page tells you where each list is, what it will show you, and, just as usefully, what it will not.
The one thing to take away. The name on the website is almost never the name on the licence. Brands are trading names; licences are issued to companies. If you only ever check one thing, check that the brand you are using appears on a government list at all.
Why this is different in Africa
Two things make the check less obvious here than the "licensed and regulated" line in a footer suggests.
- A licence is per country, and sometimes per province.South Africa licenses bookmakers province by province, so a licence in one province is not a licence in the next. Nigeria licenses at state level, and Lagos runs its own authority. A brand can be perfectly legitimate in one place and unlicensed where you are.
- Every register is missing something different. None of the four publishes a licence number. None publishes whether a licence has since been suspended. Beyond that they diverge, and the gaps are not the same gaps, so a habit that works in one country leaves you blind in another.
The four registers
Column names below are quoted from the live pages. Sample rows are real, and are shown to make the format concrete. They are not recommendations: this site has no relationship with any operator and links to none.
Ghana
Gaming Commission of Ghana — Licensed operators
Columns: Trade name | Operation type | Date Issued | Expiry Date | Location
Row as printed on the register, read 2026-09-08
BETWAY | Sports Betting | 1/1/2026 | 31/12/2026 | Accra
What you can establish: That a brand name holds a current licence, for which product, and the exact dates it runs between. Ghana is the only one of these four that tells you when the licence expires and lets you check the product type separately, so a sports-betting licence cannot be passed off as covering a casino.
What you cannot: Which company is behind the brand. The register has no legal-name column at all, so you cannot tell whether the firm taking your money is the one holding the licence.
Nigeria — Lagos State
Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority — List of licensed operators
Columns: Institution Name | Trade Name | Category ID | License Start Date | License End Date
Row as printed on the register, read 2026-09-08
Digi Bay Limited | Betway | ONLINE SPORTS BETTING/ONLINE CASINO | November 30 2026 | November 29 2027
What you can establish: The most of any register here: the company's legal name, the brand it trades under, what it is licensed for, and both dates. This row is also the clearest illustration of a thing worth internalising — the name on the website is not the name on the licence.
What you cannot: A licence number, and whether the licence has been suspended since it was issued. Lagos is one state; a licence here is not a licence for the rest of Nigeria.
Tanzania
Gaming Board of Tanzania — Licensed operators — sports betting
Columns: Company Name | Trade Name
Row as printed on the register, read 2026-09-08
8 | Media Bay Limited | Betway
What you can establish: That a named company operates a named brand with a betting licence. Registers are published per product, so the sports-betting list is the one to use for a sportsbook.
What you cannot: When the licence was issued, when it expires, or whether it is still in force today. Two columns is all there is.
South Africa — Western Cape
Western Cape Gambling and Racing Board — Licensed bookmakers
Columns: company name only
Row as printed on the register, read 2026-09-08
Raging River Trading (Pty) Ltd
What you can establish: That a company holds a bookmaker licence in this province. Betting is licensed province by province, so the province matters as much as the country.
What you cannot: Which brand the company trades as, any dates, or any status. Working back from a website to a company name is on you, and the register will not help you do it.
How to actually do the check
- Find the operating company, not the brand. It is normally in the site's terms and conditions or in the small print at the bottom of the page, often with a registered address. That company name is what you are looking for on a register, except in Ghana, where the register lists brands instead and you work the other way round.
- Open the regulator's page for your own country from the links above. Do not use a list published by a betting site, a review site or a comparison page, including this one. The point of the exercise is that the government publishes it.
- Match the exact string. Trading names are close cousins on purpose. A near-match is not a match.
- Check the product, where the register says. Ghana and Lagos both record what each licence covers. A licence for one product is not a licence for another.
- Check the dates, where the register has them. Ghana and Lagos print them. Tanzania and the Western Cape do not, so in those two you are trusting that the list is current.
What a match does not prove
- That the licence is still in force. No register here carries a status field. A row is evidence that a licence was granted, not that it survived.
- That you will be paid. A licence is permission to operate. It is not a guarantee of solvency and, in these four markets, we found nothing published about whether player balances are protected if an operator fails.
- That the odds are fair. No regulator here prices the market for you. A licensed operator may offer poor value and usually does.
- That it covers where you are. Especially in South Africa and Nigeria, where the licence is provincial or state-level.
If you cannot find it
Absence from a register is not automatically proof of anything. Some lists are incomplete, some are updated slowly, and one of these four does not publish company names at all, so a legitimate operator can be genuinely unfindable by the name you know it by. What absence does mean is that you have no confirmation, and no confirmation is a reason to keep your balance small rather than a reason to relax.
Regulators generally accept questions about whether a specific operator is licensed. Asking them directly is slower than a search and is the only answer that comes from the body that would know.
Read next
Finding your bookmaker on a register answers whether it is licensed. It does not answer what that licence obliges it to do for you.What a betting licence actually protects works that through where the rules are written down most explicitly, covering what happens to your balance if an operator fails, who settles a dispute, and how one self-exclusion can reach every licensed operator at once.
Every register above was opened and read on the date shown beside it. If a column has changed or a page has moved, that is a bug in this page and we want to hear about it. See sources and method.
Apexpari earns nothing from this page. There are no affiliate links and no operator has paid for placement or review.