Curaçao licence for Australian players: what the licence changes, and what it doesn’t

A Curaçao gaming licence tells you one thing about an online casino: the operator paid the Curaçao Gambling Authority for permission to operate from Curaçao. It tells you nothing about whether that casino is allowed to take money from someone sitting in Sydney, Perth or a wheat-belt town in New South Wales. Australia prohibits the offering of online casino games and online pokies to people in Australia under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, regardless of where the operator holds a licence, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority has spent the last several years issuing formal warnings, requesting internet service provider blocks and naming operators by name. The licence is real. The legality in Australia is not. Those two facts sit beside each other on every site that displays the Curaçao seal, and the rest of this page is what flows from them.

Currency as of 28 October 2026 · checked against the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s published blocking and warning registers.

What “Curaçao licensed” means in plain terms

A Curaçao gaming licence is issued by the Curaçao Gambling Authority under the National Ordinance on Games of Chance, the framework that took effect in late 2024 and replaced the older master/sub-licence structure that had defined the jurisdiction for the previous two decades. Operators now apply for either a B2C or a B2B licence directly, pay an application fee of €4,592, and pay annual fees set out by the Curaçao minister of finance — €47,450 for a B2C licence (a €24,490 National Treasury fee plus a €22,960 CGA supervisory fee) and ANG 48,000 for a B2B licence, with no monthly component. The CGA also supervises anti-money-laundering compliance under the National Ordinance on Identification and the National Ordinance on Unusual Transactions, and licensed operators report suspicious transactions through the goAML portal.

What that framework does: it regulates the operator from Curaçao. It sets capital, reporting and conduct requirements for the licensee. It gives the operator a single, accountable regulator and a published register where members of the public can confirm a brand’s status.

What it does not do: it does not extend to the player. A Curaçao licence does not make a casino lawful in the player’s country, and it does not give the player any right of action against the operator in Australia if a withdrawal is refused, an account is closed or a balance simply disappears. The licence sits in one jurisdiction; the player sits in another; and the two jurisdictions do not align on whether the game on offer is even legal.

This is the gap most players miss. A Curaçao seal at the foot of a homepage reads as a quality mark. It is not. It is a permission slip issued from a small Caribbean jurisdiction that has spent the last three years tightening its own rules, and it carries no weight in Australia because the question it purports to answer — is this casino legitimate — has a different answer under Australian law.

The Australian prohibition, and what counts as licensed here

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001, as amended by the Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017, makes it an offence to provide online casino games, online pokies or in-play betting to a person physically in Australia. No state or territory issues an online casino licence; none could, because the federal prohibition sits above them. What is licensed, and what Australian players can use without crossing into the prohibited zone, is wagering on racing and sporting events placed before the event, lotteries and keno. Those services are regulated at the territory level — the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission oversees 52 of Australia’s online bookmakers, including the major brands most Australians would recognise — and they operate under federal rules on consumer protection, advertising and the credit-card ban that took effect on 11 June 2024.

The distinction matters because it is the entire reason the ACMA can act against a Curaçao-licensed casino but not against a Northern Territory-licensed bookmaker taking bets on the AFL. The first is offering a prohibited service. The second is offering a licensed service under a regime that the ACMA itself supervises. A player picking between them is not picking between brands; they are picking between a legal product and an illegal one, and that distinction holds whatever logo the offshore casino puts at the bottom of its homepage.

What changes on 1 January 2027

The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 passed Parliament on 19 August 2026, and its advertising and inducement measures commence on 1 January 2027. Until that date the bill is law with a future start; from that date it begins to bite. For a reader reading this page before commencement, the practical answer is that nothing in the new framework is yet enforceable, and the ACMA’s existing powers under the 2001 Act remain the active instrument. For a reader reading after commencement, the existing framework continues to apply alongside the new advertising rules. Either way, the prohibition on offering online casino games to Australians is unchanged.

Enforcement: how the ACMA has used the rules

The ACMA’s tools are three: investigate, warn formally and direct ISPs to block. Each is a step, and each step has produced a published artefact that this page can name.

Since the first blocking request in November 2019, the ACMA had directed Australian internet service providers to block a total of 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites by mid-2026. In the round reported on 26 June 2026, twelve more names were added to that list: 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino. In each case the ACMA named the operator, named the website and named the Australian-facing service that the operator was offering.

Formal warnings are the earlier step. They are published notices, addressed to a named company, identifying a named Australian-facing brand, and they run ahead of a blocking request when the ACMA believes the operator will respond. The published warnings covering Curaçao-licensed brands include:

• Hollycorn N.V. over Sky Crown and Blue Leo, in 2022.
• Dama N.V. over six brands — Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos — in May 2022, with further warnings to the same operator over Woo Casino in March 2025 and Spirit Casino in May 2025.
• TechSolutions Group over Bizzo Casino in 2022, with a second warning to Consolutetish S.R.L. over Bizzo and National Casino in July 2025.
• Sterplay Holding Ltd over Casino Intense in April 2025.
• EOD Code SRL over Instant Casino in February 2025.
• Bamboo Media over Ignition Casino in July 2025.
• Ryker B.V. over Jackbit and CasinOK in April 2026.
• Pulsup Ltd over Rocketplay in March 2026.

The pattern in those warnings is consistent. The ACMA names the corporate operator behind the brand, the Australian-facing website, and the prohibited interactive gambling service on offer. In several cases the same operator is warned twice over different brands, which signals that the warning has not changed the operator’s behaviour and that the next step is the blocking request. A site that appears once in that register is not necessarily permanently blocked; a site that appears twice is usually a step away from being blocked outright.

A blocking-rate reading

From the first blocking request in November 2019 to the count of 1,751 blocked sites as of mid-2026, the ACMA’s enforcement tempo on illegal offshore gambling has run at roughly 280 blocked sites per year on a simple average, with the rate accelerating in the years since 2023 as the agency widened both the kinds of services it named and the affiliate marketing sites it pulled in alongside them. The range that the arithmetic supports is broad — the early years were slow, the post-2023 rounds have been larger, and the monthly figures are uneven — but the steady-state direction is clear: more sites blocked each year, not fewer. That is what a ban looks like when it is enforced rather than merely legislated, and it is the answer to the question of how seriously Australia treats an offshore casino offering its product to Australians.

The yearly rate is not a target; it is an average across years with very different volumes. What the average hides is that a single ACMA round can add a dozen names, and the agency runs several rounds a year. The figure a reader should take from it is the direction of travel, not the precise monthly cadence.

Payment method comparison

Australia’s market is large enough to attract sustained attention. H2 Gambling Capital’s 2025 report estimates that Australians lose around A$3.9 billion a year to illegal gambling sites, and the share of gambling going through legal channels has fallen from 74% in 2021 to 64%. A falling legal share alongside a rising enforcement tempo is the underlying shape of the current market, and it explains why the ACMA’s blocking list grows by hundreds of entries rather than tens.

Eleven brands the ACMA has named

The brands below are not ranked. Each one is on this page because the ACMA itself published a formal warning naming the operator and the service, and because the same service is prohibited from being offered to Australians in the first place. The point of listing them is not to direct a reader to a site that has been warned — it is to show what the warnings actually look like in practice, against what kind of brand and which kind of corporate operator.

Where a brand has been warned twice, both warnings are noted. Where the same corporate operator has been warned over several brands, those brands sit beside each other on the list, and that is the shape the ACMA’s own register has produced.

1. RocketPlay

The operator is Pulsup Ltd, with a March 2026 formal warning.

Enforcement landscape

Eleven brands the ACMA has named (2)

An earlier warning, in May 2022, was issued to Dama N.V. over Rocketplay among six other brands. Two warnings, two different corporate operators, the same Australian-facing service. The current operator, Pulsup Ltd, is named; the underlying licence it displays sits with the Curaçao Gambling Authority, which does not authorise the service in Australia.

A player looking at RocketPlay today is looking at a brand whose Australian-facing operation has been formally warned twice. The brand’s own pages describe its Curaçao credentials; the ACMA’s register describes its Australian-facing service as prohibited. Both statements are true, and they coexist on the same site.

2. Level Up Casino

Dama N.V. was the named operator in the ACMA’s May 2022 warning covering Level Up Casino. Level Up is one of six brands named in that single warning — Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos — and the warning sits alongside the later Dama N.V. warnings over Woo Casino and Spirit Casino. Dama N.V. is, by count of published ACMA actions, one of the most-named operators in the Australian enforcement register, and a reader comparing Level Up to other brands on this list should know that the operator behind it has been the subject of multiple warnings.

3. Woo Casino

The ACMA’s March 2025 warning to Dama N.V. named Woo Casino. The brand sits between the 2022 warning over Dama N.V.’s earlier batch of brands and the May 2025 warning over Spirit Casino — three warnings, eighteen months apart, the same operator. The pattern is the same one visible elsewhere on this list: the corporate operator changes brand as quickly as the regulator names it, and the warning does not produce the only outcome that would change the picture, which is a withdrawal from the Australian market.

4. Spirit Casino

The ACMA’s May 2025 warning to Dama N.V. named Spirit Casino. This is the third Dama N.V. warning on this list. For a reader weighing whether the operator behind one Curaçao-licensed brand differs meaningfully from the operator behind another, the warnings register makes the answer plain: the same operator appears under several brands, and the warning is the regulator’s response each time the same operator offers a new Australian-facing service.

5. National Casino

The ACMA’s July 2025 warning was issued to Consolutetish S.R.L., naming both National Casino and Bizzo Casino. A brand that appears once in the ACMA’s register is unusual; a brand that appears twice is rarer still. National Casino sits in the same warning as Bizzo, and that pairing is the regulator’s own framing of the two services: the same operator, the same prohibited offering, two Australian-facing front doors.

6. Bizzo Casino

Bizzo was first the subject of a 2022 warning to TechSolutions Group; the July 2025 warning to Consolutetish S.R.L. names Bizzo a second time, alongside National Casino. Two operators, three years apart, the same brand. The 2022 warning has not produced a permanent change, and the 2025 warning is the regulator’s response.

7. Ignition Casino

The ACMA’s July 2025 warning named Bamboo Media over Ignition Casino. Ignition Casino is the only brand on this list named in a warning to Bamboo Media; the operator does not recur on the ACMA’s published register elsewhere. A single warning is not, on its own, evidence that the operator is a serial offender. It is evidence that the ACMA identified the service as prohibited and put the operator on notice.

8. Instant Casino

The ACMA’s February 2025 warning was issued to EOD Code SRL over Instant Casino. The brand sits alone in its warning; the operator does not recur elsewhere on the ACMA’s published register. The brand’s own marketing leans heavily on the speed of withdrawals, which is also the kind of feature that attracts Australian players and the kind of feature that the ACMA’s enforcement framework is designed to render unavailable through blocking.

9. Jackbit

The ACMA’s April 2026 warning named Ryker B.V. over Jackbit and CasinOK. Two brands, one warning, one corporate operator. CasinOK does not appear elsewhere on this page; Jackbit does. The pattern is the same one visible at Dama N.V. and at Consolutetish S.R.L. — a single corporate operator offering several Australian-facing services, the warning covering all of them at once.

10. Casino Intense

The ACMA’s April 2025 warning was issued to Sterplay Holding Ltd over Casino Intense. A single brand, a single operator, a single warning. Casino Intense is the smallest footprint on this list by published ACMA action, and the reader comparing it to other brands here should not infer safety from the absence of further warnings; the warning itself is the regulator’s view that the service is prohibited.

11. Sky Crown

The ACMA published a formal warning to Hollycorn N.V. over Sky Crown and Blue Leo in 2022. Sky Crown sits on this list with one published warning to one named operator; Blue Leo, named in the same warning, does not appear separately because the operator’s name and the date are the same. The September 2022 warning is the regulator’s most distant action on this list, and the brand is also one of the most-established on it, which is itself information about how long an offshore brand can continue to operate while under notice.

What is and isn’t available to an Australian player

A player making a choice on the Australian market has three honest options.

The first is a licensed Australian wagering service — a sports bookmaker or a racing bookmaker licensed by the Northern Territory, by another state or territory, or by the Australian Capital Territory. These are the only services that are lawful to use from Australia. They take bets on racing and on sport before the event. They do not offer online casino games, online pokies or in-play betting, because they are not licensed to. The credit-card ban applies, the advertising rules apply, the consumer protection regime applies, and the player’s balance is held by an Australian entity under Australian supervision.

The second is the land-based, licensed Australian venues — Crown Melbourne, The Star Sydney, the casino floors in Perth, Adelaide, the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Hobart, Darwin and the smaller jurisdictions. These are not online products. They are licensed, regulated, supervised, and subject to the state-level frameworks that govern responsible gambling and consumer protection in physical venues.

The third is the offshore service, the Curaçao-licensed casino that displays its seal at the foot of the homepage. This service is prohibited from being offered to Australians. The ACMA has formally warned several of the brands on this list by name. The same offshore service gives the player no Australian consumer protection, no Australian complaints body and no Australian recourse if a withdrawal is refused. A balance held offshore can be stranded when the site is blocked. The player is not committing an offence — the IGA targets the provider — but the player is the one who loses the money if the service disappears.

Payment methods, and what each one tells you

The legal and the prohibited services run on overlapping but distinct rails, and the payment method itself is a useful diagnostic.

Bank transfer through PayID or Osko is the dominant Australian deposit method for licensed services. PayID transfers show the account holder’s name before the payment is sent; over 100 Australian financial institutions participate; more than 25 million PayID identifiers are registered on the New Payments Platform. Australian Payments Plus, which operates PayID, Osko and BPAY, explicitly warns that being asked to send a PayID transfer to an illegal gambling site is almost certainly a scam signal. A licensed Australian wagering service uses PayID; an illegal offshore casino asking for one is a sign of how it routes money around the prohibition.

BPAY is a bill-payment system that runs through online banking. It has been operating since 1997, is available at over 140 Australian banks and financial institutions and is offered by over 95,000 businesses. It is the standard method for paying licensed Australian services that issue a bill — racing and sports deposits, keno top-ups — and it is not the payment method an offshore casino uses.

Credit cards and credit-related products are banned for licensed online wagering since 11 June 2024, with penalties up to A$247,500 for operators that accept them. The ban also constrains linked digital wallets: an Australian-licensed wagering service cannot accept a deposit via Apple Pay funded from a credit card. Apple Pay itself charges no consumer fee; any surcharge is the merchant’s card-processing fee. Transaction limits and PIN requirements are set by the card issuer, not by Apple. The offshore casino asking for a credit card deposit is operating outside the Australian rules on both sides — it is offering a prohibited service and accepting a prohibited payment.

Bank gambling blocks sit at the card level. Westpac refuses authorisation of transactions carrying the merchant category code “Betting/Casino Gambling” on eligible personal credit and debit cards. ANZ’s gambling block, activated in the ANZ app, blocks gambling transactions including those routed through Apple Pay on an eligible card, and removing the block requires a 48-hour cooling-off period. Neither bank claims that the block catches every gambling transaction; both warn that some non-gambling transactions may be blocked in error. The point of the block is to give the customer a hard wall between their bank account and a gambling merchant, and the merchant categories on which the block fires are the same categories an offshore casino falls into when it offers its product to Australians.

AUSTRAC’s threshold transaction report rule applies to physical cash transfers of A$10,000 or more; ordinary electronic bank transfers are not subject to the same per-transaction reporting requirement regardless of amount. The rule is not a limit on what an Australian player can move; it is a reporting trigger that does not fire on a PayID transfer at any amount.

American Express operates as a three-party scheme rather than a four-party network, issuing its own cards and processing its own transactions. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s July 2025 review proposes removing surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa transactions, and explicitly leaves American Express outside the scope of that proposal. None of this changes the credit-card ban under the IGA; an Amex credit card remains a prohibited payment method for Australian-licensed wagering, in the same way a Visa or Mastercard credit card does.

Mobile wallets in the Australian market

By the end of 2025, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay together accounted for around 45% of all card payments in Australia by number. That share is dominated by debit cards, where wallet use is straightforward, rather than credit cards, where the IGA ban applies. A licensed wagering service sees a wallet transaction as a card transaction under the hood, and the same rules apply: a debit-funded wallet deposit is permissible, a credit-funded wallet deposit is not. The offshore casino does not face the same constraint from the Australian side because it does not face the Australian side at all.

What the Curaçao reform changed, and what it did not

The LOK framework — the National Ordinance on Games of Chance that took effect at the end of 2024 — replaced the master/sub-licence structure that had previously defined Curaçao’s gambling regime. Under the old framework, a small number of master licence holders sub-licensed an unbounded set of operators, and the supervisory reach of the regulator was diluted by the structure itself. Under LOK, every operator applies directly to the CGA, pays a published fee and is supervised as a single accountable entity. The fee structure is now published and the register of licensees is now central rather than distributed across sub-licence holders.

That is a real change. The CGA’s own communication of the reform emphasises the move to direct supervision, the alignment of Curaçao’s anti-money-laundering framework with international standards and the publication of a single register of licensees. A player who checks the CGA register can confirm that a brand holds a current licence and read what kind of licence it holds.

What the reform did not change is the question of whether a Curaçao licence authorises an operator to take bets from players in jurisdictions where the offering is prohibited. It does not. The licence authorises the operator to operate from Curaçao. It does not extend to the player’s home country. The ACMA’s enforcement register over Curaçao-licensed brands in 2025 and 2026 makes this concrete, and the register will continue to grow as long as offshore operators treat Australia as a market they can serve from a licence issued somewhere else.

Responsible gambling around an offshore product

BetStop, the National Self-Exclusion Register, has been live since August 2023. It binds Australian-licensed online and phone wagering services, and a player who registers with BetStop is excluded from every service that participates. An offshore casino is not a participant, because it is not licensed in Australia and is not subject to the regime that produces participation. BetStop therefore does not exclude a player from a Curaçao-licensed casino. The same is true of the spending limits, deposit caps and cooling-off periods that apply to Australian-licensed services under the IGA and the territory-level frameworks: they bind the licensed services and do not reach the offshore offering.

The 24/7 National Gambling Helpline — 1800 858 858, free — and the chat service at Gambling Help Online are not bound by the same constraint. They are available to anyone in Australia, regardless of which product they have been using. A player who has been using an offshore casino and finds that the product no longer matches what they want from gambling can reach the helpline, speak to a counsellor, and use the same self-exclusion tools that apply to the legal market to keep themselves out of the legal market. What the helpline cannot do is exclude the player from an offshore site; that is a gap that exists because the offshore site is outside the Australian regime, not because the helpline is unwilling.

If a player has been using an offshore casino and is in financial difficulty as a result, the relevant Australian services are the same ones that apply to any Australian in financial difficulty from gambling — the helpline, financial counselling and, where appropriate, the bank. The bank gambling block is one of the more useful tools available because it operates at the merchant category level and does not depend on the offshore site participating in any Australian scheme. A player who has decided that they want to stop is best served by a hard, network-level block on gambling transactions, applied at the bank before they decide to stop again, rather than by promises made by an offshore site they have already decided to leave.

A note on what is not on this page

This page does not carry bonus terms for any of the brands above, and that is a deliberate omission. The only sources for bonus figures and bonus terms in the public domain are affiliate marketing pages, whose commercial interest in the figure is the reason the figure exists. A bonus number attached to a Curaçao-licensed brand offered to Australians is a number that no Australian consumer protection regime backs, and a reader weighing one against another is comparing marketing claims rather than offers.

The page also does not carry a withdrawal-time benchmark. The offshore market’s published withdrawal times are a marketing figure in the same way, and the ACMA’s register is full of brands that were blocked with balances still on them. The honest answer to “how long does a withdrawal take” is: however long the operator decides, with no Australian recourse if the decision is to refuse.

Frequently asked questions

Does a Curaçao gaming licence give an operator any legal standing to serve Australian players?

No. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 makes it an offence to provide online casino games or online pokies to a person in Australia, regardless of where the operator holds a licence. A Curaçao licence authorises the operator to operate from Curaçao; it does not authorise the offering of those games to Australians.

What changed when Curaçao’s National Ordinance on Games of Chance took effect?

The new framework replaced the old master/sub-licence structure with direct licensing by the Curaçao Gambling Authority. Operators now apply for a B2C or B2B licence directly, pay published application and annual fees, and are supervised as single accountable entities. The reform tightens Curaçao’s own regime but does not change what the licence covers outside Curaçao.

Who is the regulator behind a Curaçao gaming licence?

The Curaçao Gambling Authority (CGA), operating under the National Ordinance on Games of Chance. The CGA supervises licence holders and administers the AML/CFT framework that licensed operators report into through the goAML portal.

Does the ACMA treat a Curaçao-licensed site any differently from an unlicensed one?

For the player in Australia, no. The IGA prohibits the offering of online casino games regardless of the offshore licence. The ACMA’s published register shows formal warnings over Curaçao-licensed brands including RocketPlay, Woo Casino, National Casino and Bizzo Casino, and the same enforcement regime applies to any offshore site that offers a prohibited service to Australians.

Can an Australian pursue a dispute against a Curaçao-licensed operator through an Australian regulator?

No Australian regulator has jurisdiction over a Curaçao-licensed operator for an Australian player dispute. The CGA’s own complaints process applies to the operator from Curaçao’s side; an Australian player has no Australian complaints body to take a withdrawal refusal or an account closure to. This is the practical consequence of an offshore licence sitting outside the Australian regime.

How does a Curaçao licence differ from the licences held by Australian land-based casinos?

Australian land-based casino licences are issued by state and territory regulators and cover physical premises within the licensing jurisdiction. A Curaçao licence covers an online operation from Curaçao. They are not comparable licences covering comparable products — one is a state-issued venue licence, the other is a national-issued offshore licence — and a reader should not infer equivalence from the shared word.