AGLC Licensed Online Casinos: How to Verify

Two lists, one answer

"Is this casino legal in Alberta?" has a checkable answer since the regulated market launched — but the answer lives in two places, not one. The Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) runs a searchable public register of every registered gaming business at aglc.ca/gaming-registrants — the regulatory record. The Alberta iGaming Corporation (AiGC) keeps a separate directory of regulated iGaming sites at abigaming.ca — the live market. A brand can sit in the first list and be absent from the second, and on 2026-07-23 most registered brands were exactly that: AGLC's last dated operator list carried 49 brands, while AiGC's directory showed 24 live sites. Verifying a casino means checking both, in the right order, and reading the register's own vocabulary correctly.

One terminology note before the mechanics: Alberta's framework speaks of *registration*, not licensing. What players search for as an "AGLC licence" is, in the regulator's own records, a registration with AGLC paired with a commercial agreement with the AiGC — AGLC's iGaming guidance states that "As of July 13, all operators must be registered with AGLC" and have that agreement signed (AGLC iGaming). The legal machinery behind those two keys is covered in our explainer on whether online gambling is legal in Alberta; the live market status — who has actually launched, and the register-to-directory gap as it closes — is what our Alberta iGaming launch tracker follows. This page is the verification manual that sits between them, part of our wider Canadian regulation coverage.

This article analyses primary sources only: AGLC's online register and registration documents, and the Alberta iGaming Corporation's published player guidance — every register detail below was checked directly against the register on 2026-07-17. We do not deposit at casinos in Canada, and nothing here is first-hand testing. See our methodology for how we source and flag claims.

How AGLC's registrant register works

Since launch, AGLC publishes registrations through a searchable online register rather than a standing consolidated list — its iGaming page links to it under the instruction "Search the full list of registered entities" (AGLC iGaming). The register covers all of Alberta's gaming industry, not just online play: a Stream filter separates Bingo, Casino, Electronic Raffle System, iGaming, Pull Ticket, Raffle and Racing Entertainment Centre. For casino verification, the iGaming stream is the one that matters.

Each entry shows four things: the registrant's name, an expiry date, the stream, and a class of registration. The names are the first trap for anyone verifying a brand, because the register lists legal entities with their trade names attached by "o/a" — operating as. BET99 appears as "2786638 Alberta Inc. o/a BET99"; tooniebet appears under Albertix Gaming. The keyword search does match trade names: searching "bet365" on 2026-07-17 returned two entries, Hillside (International Gaming) ENC and Hillside (International Sports) ENC — the casino and sports arms registered separately, both classed as iGaming - Operator, both showing an expiry of 2027-07-13. That per-entry expiry date is the register's built-in freshness check: a registration is a dated permission, not a permanent badge.

Two practical features round out the mechanics. The register offers a CSV export of the full dataset — the only machine-readable record of the market's registration side — and an expiry-date filter ("Displays items on or before the expiry date") plus name and expiry sorting. What it does not offer is any marker distinguishing a registrant that is live and taking bets from one that is merely registered — a gap significant enough that it gets its own section below.

What the four iGaming categories mean

The class-of-registration field is where verification goes wrong most easily, because the iGaming stream contains four classes and only one of them describes a site allowed to take your bets. AGLC's last dated registrants list — in effect as of 2026-07-03, published as a PDF before the online register took over — shows the scale of each: 49 iGaming - Operator registrations, 56 iGaming - Critical Gaming Systems Provider registrations, 14 iGaming - Platform Provider registrations and 14 under iGaming Goods or Services Supplier - Other (AGLC iGaming registrants list).

iGaming - Operator is the consumer-facing class: the brands a player can hold an account with. This is where DraftKings sits (as Crown DK CAN Ltd.), FanDuel (FanDuel Canada ULC), BetMGM (BetMGM Canada Inc.) and the rest — including Play Alberta itself, which is registered like everyone else. Critical Gaming Systems Provider covers game and systems suppliers: Pragmatic Play is registered here (as Arrise Solutions (Malta) Limited), as are Evolution's Malta entities. Platform Provider is the technology stack operators run on. Goods or Services Supplier - Other is the catch-all for the rest of the supply chain — the test labs eCOGRA and Gaming Laboratories International sit here, and so does Skrill Limited, the payments brand.

The traps follow directly. A site advertising "games by Pragmatic Play" is pointing at a supplier registration, not its own — supplier classes authorize nothing on the consumer side. Skrill's presence in the register does not make a Skrill-accepting casino legal. And one legal entity can hold a stack of brand registrations: on the July 3 list, Apollo Entertainment Limited held seven operator registrations (Captain Cooks Casino, Casino Classic, Golden Tiger Casino, Grand Mondial Casino, Luxury Casino, Yukon Gold Casino and Zodiac Casino), Cadtree Limited held four (JackpotCity, Royal Vegas, Ruby Fortune and Spin Casino), and Skill On Net Ltd. held four operator brands while also appearing as a platform provider and a critical-systems provider. Verification therefore runs brand by brand, not company by company — a parent with one registered brand has not thereby registered its whole portfolio.

The gap: registered is not the same as live

The register's structural gap is the one this site's Alberta coverage keeps returning to: AGLC's register records the regulatory step, but going live requires more — AGLC itself pairs registration with a signed AiGC commercial agreement in its post-launch guidance (AGLC iGaming) — and the register surfaces none of that second half. No live-versus-registered marker, no consolidated operator count, no agreement status. The result on 2026-07-23: 49 operator brands on the last dated register list, 24 live sites in AiGC's regulated-sites directory, and nothing in the register itself that tells you which side of that gap a given brand is on.

That is why the AiGC directory, not the AGLC register, is the final word on where an Albertan can play today. The AiGC describes the directory as "a complete list of every approved operator in the province" and draws the line in one sentence: "If an operator does not appear in our directory, it is not regulated" (AiGC players guidance). The register still earns its place in verification — it is the only public record of the class and expiry of a registration, and the only place to catch a brand claiming legality on the back of a supplier entry — but it answers "is this company registered", not "is this site legal to play right now". How fast the 49-to-24 gap closes, brand by brand, is what our launch tracker reconciles as AiGC's directory grows.

Red flags after the wind-down deadline

Alberta's launch day doubled as its compliance deadline — "As of July 13, all operators must be registered with AGLC" (AGLC iGaming) — so a site taking Alberta players without a register entry is not in a grace period or a grey area of interpretation; it is operating outside the framework. Which brands exited, registered or received extensions has not been published by the regulator as of 2026-07-23; the launch tracker records that wind-down as AGLC publishes it. In the meantime, the register and directory give a player everything needed to sort sites into three piles.

The clean red flags, each checkable in under a minute: the brand returns nothing in the register's iGaming stream under either its trade name or its legal name; the site answers licensing questions by pointing at a foreign licence — a licence from another jurisdiction is not an Alberta registration, and the only lists that count in Alberta are AGLC's register and AiGC's directory; the site claims legitimacy through its suppliers ("certified games", "licensed platform") when its own name holds no operator registration; or the site is absent from AiGC's directory and shows no AiGC logo. Any one of these puts a site outside the protections the AiGC lists for regulated play: guaranteed oversight, security and financial standards, certified fair play, the centralised self-exclusion program — a required integration for every registered operator — and a formal dispute path that runs from the operator's support desk to the AiGC itself (AiGC players guidance).

The middle pile deserves the nuance: a brand that is in the register but not in the directory is not exposed as a bad actor — it is a registrant that has not completed the path to live operation. The honest reading is "not yet regulated for play", and the AiGC's directory rule applies to it in the meantime. Check again before depositing; the directory is the list that moves.