A new casino goes through the same checklist we apply to established brands before it appears on this site — we do not relax our standards for newer platforms, and a handful of new casinos we have evaluated have not made the published list because they did not pass licensing or payment verification.
The first check is licensing: we confirm the operator holds an active gambling licence (commonly Curacao or Malta Gaming Authority for the casinos we cover) and that the licence number resolves to the correct operating entity, not a shell company reusing an old registration.
The second check is a real-money test of deposits and withdrawals, including how the casino handles identity verification (KYC) at withdrawal time. New casinos sometimes advertise fast payouts but only after an unadvertised, lengthy first-withdrawal verification process — we flag this explicitly when we see it rather than only reporting the advertised processing time.
Because a new casino has a shorter track record, we also monitor it more closely after listing than we do an established brand — watching for changes to ownership, licence status, or bonus terms in the weeks after launch, and updating or removing the listing if standards slip.