Is the Anjouan Gambling Licence Legitimate? The Legal Chain, the Empty Enforcement Record, and the Scam Claim

Four questions, not one

People asking whether the Anjouan licence is legitimate are usually asking one of four different things, and the answers diverge sharply.

Is it legally valid? Under Anjouan’s own legislation, a framework, an authority and a register exist. The Union of the Comoros says otherwise: its central bank has called the Authority a fictitious structure (see below).

Does it give market access? No. It carries no territorial rights of any kind.

Is it well regarded? No. It sits at the bottom of the reputational range.

Will counterparties accept it? Often not, and that is where most of the practical pain lands.

A page that answers one of these and implies the rest is the reason the question keeps getting asked. Below, each on its own evidence.

What can be verified

The framework rests on legislation adopted in 2005, including the Anjouan Computer Gaming Licensing Act, on the autonomous island of Anjouan within the Union of the Comoros.

The institutional chain is published and has four parts. The Anjouan Offshore Financial Authority is the competent regulatory authority. The Anjouan Gaming Board oversees licence administration. Anjouan Licensing Services Inc. is the sole authorised administrator and official representative of the Board. The platform at anjouangaming.com carries the register, the verification tool, the fee schedule and the licence conditions.

That is more published infrastructure than several better-regarded offshore regimes maintain, and it is checkable. The fee schedule is public, which is not true everywhere. Licence conditions are public. The register accepts a domain and returns the holder, the number, the type and the status.

One correction while we are here. The regulator is widely called the Anjouan Betting and Gaming Board, abbreviated ABGB. That name appears nowhere on the Authority’s site. This site used it too, in a page title, until September 2026.

What cannot be verified, and matters

The enforcement record is empty. The Authority publishes a revoked-licences page with a table laid out under the headings Company, Termination Date, Licence Number, Type, Domains and Reason. There are no rows in it.

That is the single most informative fact on this page, and it has to be read carefully in both directions. It is not evidence of concealment; a regime that began licensing at scale in 2023 may genuinely not have revoked anything yet. But an enforcement power that has never visibly been used tells you less than one that has. There is no public record of how this Authority behaves when an operator misbehaves, because there is no published instance of it happening.

The stated consequence of revocation is unusually hard: permanent, no future licensing considered, and the associated URLs permanently blocked from use under any other licence. Blocking the domains as well as the company closes the usual re-registration escape. It is a well-designed power with no published use.

There are no recognition arrangements. The Authority’s international cooperation page describes no memoranda of understanding with other regulators and no recognition by them. It cites the accession of the Comoros to the World Trade Organization in August 2024, which is a general trade framework and not a gambling arrangement. Anyone presenting WTO accession as regulatory recognition is overreading it.

The Authority does not review what the register might imply. In its own words, verification “does not constitute an endorsement of the licence holder’s services, products, or business practices”. So licensing status carries no assurance about game fairness, solvency or whether withdrawals get paid.

The scam claim, on its merits

A page arguing that the Anjouan licence is a scam ranks second for this question. Ignoring it would be the easy option and the wrong one.

The strongest version of the argument is not that the Authority is fictional. It is that a licence with no enforcement record, no recognition, no market access and weak counterparty acceptance delivers little of what buyers think they are getting, while being marketed as though it delivers a lot. On that framing, the criticism has force, and most of the supporting facts on this page are the same ones a critic would cite.

The weak version, that the register is fabricated, does not survive contact with the evidence. The framework, the published conditions, the fee schedule and the register are all there and all checkable.

The version that the regulator does not exist has a stronger backer than any vendor page: the Union of the Comoros. In a communiqué dated 15 June 2022 on illegal offshore banking, the Central Bank of the Comoros named the Anjouan Offshore Financial Authority, Anjouan Corporate Services and three other bodies as “structures fictives” that grant approvals illegally, and said it had referred them to the prosecutors of Moroni, Mutsamudu and Mohéli. That communiqué concerns banking and financial approvals and does not mention gaming; the gaming licences are issued under the same Authority. Our Comoros page sets out the communiqué, the 2013 Banking Law and the 2018 Constitution that the Union relies on, with the register counted on 8 October 2026. The honest reading is that the licence exists under Anjouan’s law and does not exist under the Union’s.

Our reading: the licence is real and the marketing around it frequently is not. The gap between what an Anjouan licence is and what it is sold as is wide enough to explain the accusation without justifying the strongest form of it.

What this licence is genuinely useful for

For an operator serving markets that do not license gambling domestically, it provides a regulated footing, obtained quickly, at a published price, with a public register a counterparty can check. That is a real product.

What it will not do is open a regulated market, satisfy a tier-one payment provider, or substitute for a licence in the country where your players are. Our market-access analysis works through why, and our verification guide covers what a register entry does and does not establish.

How to test a licence seller’s claims

Four questions expose most of the overselling. Ask which regulator name appears on the Authority’s own site, because a seller still saying Anjouan Betting and Gaming Board is working from stale material. Ask what the renewal costs, since the published figure is the same as issuance and a lower number signals an out-of-date source. Ask which specific markets the licence permits, and treat any answer other than “none by itself” as a warning. And ask to see the licence in the public register by domain rather than as a certificate image.