iGaming Ontario registry: how to check an operator yourself

What the iGaming Ontario registry is, and why only Ontario has one

The igaming Ontario registry is a public catalogue of the gaming sites allowed to take real-money play from people in Ontario, published with a date on it. Two bodies sit behind that. The AGCO, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, is the regulator: it sets the standards and handles registration. iGaming Ontario, usually shortened to iGO, conducts and manages the market itself.

Only Ontario has such a list because only Ontario needs one. Everywhere else in Canada the province runs the single legal online operator itself, so the question of who is permitted answers itself. Ontario opened the market to private operators instead, which creates a problem no monopoly has: competing sites, convincing imitations of them, and no way for a player to tell the two apart by looking.

As at 1 September 2026 the catalogue held 49 operators and 84 gaming sites. Read those two numbers together, because the gap between them is the lesson of this page. There are more sites than operators, so one company can run several sites under several names. What you are checking is therefore not a company you heard of in an advert. It is the exact site in front of you.

How to check a site in about a minute, step by step

Do this before you deposit, and do it from the address bar rather than from a link someone sent you. The catalogue is at https://igamingontario.ca/en/player/regulated-igaming-market. Type it by hand, or search for iGaming Ontario and reach it from the official site. You are about to compare one string of text to another, so keep the site you are checking open in a second tab with its domain visible.

Match the site name, not the brand. Advertising carries brand names, sponsorship carries brand names, and a comparison page carries whatever anchor text its author chose. None of those is what the catalogue lists. It lists gaming sites, and a site is a domain. Read it character by character, ending included: one swapped letter is the standard shape of an imitation, built to survive a glance.

Then read across to the operator listed beside it. Entries appear as pairs: the gaming site, and the company that operates it. Confirm the pair is intact rather than confirming that some name you recognise appears somewhere on the page. If the site itself is absent, a familiar company name elsewhere in the catalogue covers nothing. Absent is absent, and the last section explains what that means.

• Type the catalogue address yourself rather than following a link from an advert or a comparison page.
• Note the date published on the catalogue before you read a single entry in it.
• Copy the exact domain of the site you are on out of the address bar, ending included.
• Search the catalogue for that domain, not for the brand name used in advertising.
• Read the operating company beside it, and expect a corporate name you have never seen.
• Check that site and operator appear together as a pair, not half an entry.
• If the site is not listed at all, read the last section of this page first.

Why the operator's company name is not the site name

This is the trap, and it is why most people decide the catalogue is broken and go back to trusting a toplist. The name on the website is a trading name. The entity registered to run it is a legal company, and legal companies are usually called something else: a holding company, an operating subsidiary, sometimes a numbered company with no recognisable words in it at all.

So two searches fail for opposite reasons. The brand from a television advert may find nothing, because the brand is marketing and the catalogue is corporate. A company name from a footer may find something and still tell you nothing about the site you are on, because that company can run several sites and only some may be listed. The pair is the unit of information.

That mismatch is what an imitation site is built to exploit. It borrows the brand, the colours and the wording, drops a plausible licensing sentence into the footer, and relies on you recognising the brand instead of reading the domain. A footer is whatever someone last pasted into a template. The catalogue is a dated record that a public body is accountable for.

The brand in the advert, the domain in your address bar and the operating company in the catalogue can be three different names; the catalogue lists the last two as a pair, so match the domain first and read the company second.

What the registry does not tell you

A listing is a floor, not a recommendation. It means a company holds registration and operates inside Ontario's regulated market under the AGCO's standards, with iGO conducting and managing that market. That is more than you can establish about a site with no Canadian oversight behind it. It is not a review, a rating or a quality mark.

Specifically, it says nothing about money moving. It does not measure how long a payout takes, does not promise a route back along the method you deposited with, and has no opinion on a finance queue. It does not tell you whether the terms you are about to accept are reasonable, and it has no view on an offer or a wagering condition.

It also says nothing about you. Your limits, your verification requirements and your eligibility for anything promotional are decided by the operator applying its terms to your account, and two players at the same listed site can meet different numbers on the same afternoon. Use the catalogue for the one thing it settles, and collect the rest yourself, the way we set out on the home page.

The date on the catalogue is part of the fact

Every statement the catalogue makes is a statement about one day. The figures above are the example: 49 operators and 84 gaming sites is what the catalogue held at 1 September 2026, and repeating that without the date turns a verified fact into a vague impression. The same applies to your own check. What you confirm is that a site was listed on the day you looked.

That matters because the list moves. Sites are added, sites are withdrawn, companies leave the market, and names change as corporate arrangements change underneath them. None of it is announced to you. A result from the spring is a result about the spring. "It was in the catalogue when I signed up" is a sentence about the past, used as though it described the present.

So build the check into the moments where a minute is worth spending: before a first deposit, before an unusually large one, and whenever you land on a site you reached from an advert rather than by typing an address. Recent arrivals are the clearest case, which is why new casinos in Ontario are worth looking up on the day.

iGO and OLG are two different arrangements

This confuses people constantly, so keep it plain. Private operators in Ontario's regulated market conduct their online business through iGaming Ontario, under registration with the AGCO. OLG.ca is not one of them: it runs under the conduct and management of OLG itself, not through iGO. Both are legal routes to online play in Ontario, under different arrangements.

The practical consequence is about where you look and what absence proves. The iGO catalogue is where you confirm a private operator's site, and a site missing from it says nothing about OLG, which was never going to appear there. If you are on OLG.ca, the thing to verify is narrower: that you are on the official domain and not an imitation of it.

What "physically in Ontario" actually means

Access to Ontario's regulated market is conditioned on being physically in Ontario when you play, and the minimum age is 19. That describes how the market is defined. It is not travel advice, and it is not something this page will help you work around. Operators check location because the market they are registered in is a provincial one, and the check belongs to them.

Day to day it means predictable friction. Residence and presence are not the same thing, so an Ontario resident sitting somewhere else is outside the market's reach while that is true, and a visitor standing in Ontario is inside it. If you spend real time in another province, read how that province's own arrangement works before assuming anything carries across.

The rest of Canada: provincial monopolies, and what changes for you

Outside Ontario's commercial market the pattern is one provincial operator per province: OLG in Ontario, Loto-Quebec in Quebec, BCLC in British Columbia, PlayAlberta in Alberta, and the relevant corporation elsewhere. These are crown operations answerable to their own province. There is no private regulated market to join and therefore no catalogue to consult, because the question a catalogue answers does not arise when one operator is permitted.

That changes the player's position in a specific way. In a monopoly there is nothing to verify and nothing to choose: accountability is obvious, and the trade-off is a single cashier, a single set of terms and no competitive pressure on either. In Ontario you get choice, and the price is establishing which competing site is inside the market. We work through the provinces on real money casino Canada.

If you are weighing the two routes against each other, weigh what you can establish rather than what each one advertises. With a provincial operator the identity is certain and the choice is nil. With a listed private site the identity is checkable in a minute and the choice is real. Both beat a site you cannot look up anywhere, as real money casino Ontario sets out.

BetGuard: one action, every regulated site in Ontario

BetGuard launched on 14 May 2026 as a single self-exclusion portal for the province. One action through it switches off your access to all regulated gaming sites in Ontario, OLG included, for a period starting at six months. Understand that before you need it: it is not a per-site setting you repeat on dozens of cashiers, and it does not stop at the boundary between iGO's market and OLG.

Because it is a single door with real consequences behind it, it attracts imitation, and iGO has warned specifically about sites pretending to be BetGuard. The protection is dull and effective: type betguard.ca into the address bar yourself. Do not reach it through a search advert, a message, a pop-up or an email link, and close any page that asks for identity documents after a redirect you did not initiate.

Self-exclusion is also not only a tool of last resort, and treating it as one is why people never reach for it. Deposit limits and session limits are the smaller, reversible versions of the same instinct, and they are easier to set while nothing has gone wrong. The full set of tools is covered on the responsible gambling page.

iGO has warned about counterfeit sites imitating BetGuard, so reach it only by typing betguard.ca yourself, never through a search advert, a message or a link in an email.

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Where to go for help, and who actually answers

ConnexOntario is the province's free information and referral service for problems with gambling, mental health and substance use. It is at https://www.connexontario.ca/, it is confidential, and it operates separately from any operator: the people answering have nothing to sell you and no account of yours to retain. You do not need a diagnosis, a crisis or a plan worked out in advance.

Keep the three kinds of help distinct, because they do different work. BetGuard removes access. Deposit and session limits cap what can move. ConnexOntario is where a person talks with you about the part no switch reaches. Online gambling in Ontario is for adults aged 19 and over and it costs money over time by design, and when it stops looking like budgeted entertainment, use one of the three.

If the site is not in the catalogue

Absence from the catalogue is not a verdict about anyone's honesty, and nothing here is an accusation. What it does mean is narrow and worth stating plainly: the regulator's protections do not reach that site. If something goes wrong with your money there, no Ontario body is positioned to take it up for you. There is no file, no provincial standard applied, and no public record to point at.

Picture what a dispute looks like under those conditions. A balance is held. A verification request loops back for the same document a third time. A withdrawal is refused on a term you had not read. Inside the regulated market there is a regulator whose standards the operator agreed to meet. Outside it, your only counterparty is the party you are arguing with.

So the instruction here is not how to proceed carefully with a site that is not listed, and this page will not supply one. It is to recognise what you would be giving up. If you want a shortlist built out of checkable things, start from sites you can look up: payment routes on casinos that accept Interac, the wider field on top Canadian casinos.

22BET: run the same check before you deposit

This site recommends 22BET, and the recommendation changes nothing about the procedure above. Look the site up in the catalogue yourself, on the day you intend to deposit, and read the date the catalogue carries while you are there. We are not going to tell you what you will find, because the catalogue is the record and a page like this one is not.

The rest of it is the cashier. Once you are logged in, read which deposit routes are offered to your account, which withdrawal routes come back the other way, what the stated minimum is for the method you intend to use, and what the conditions say about verification. Those numbers govern what happens to your money, and no third-party page can see them for you.

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19+ in Ontario, 18+ in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec. The rating shown here is the operator rating reported by the site owner on 19 October 2026: five stars from 4,889 reviews. Availability depends on where you are and on eligibility. Deposit routes, cashout timing, verification steps, offer structure, wagering and limits are set by the operator and are not stated here — read them in the cashier and in the current terms after you sign in. We do not guarantee payout speed or availability in your province. Gambling costs money; treat any balance as spent. Checked: 19 October 2026.