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How we score

ProbityScore is a single, transparent 0–100 trust rating for online casinos.
Every score is built only from verifiable evidence — regulator records, complaint outcomes, measured payout times, independent certification, and verified reviews from our own members — and is calculated the same way for every operator. No casino can pay to change its score, hide its reviews, or buy a higher rating. The full methodology is published here so anyone can see exactly how a score is reached.

This page describes Methodology version 1.1.

The seven pillars

Every ProbityScore is the weighted sum of seven pillars, totalling 100 points:

  • Licensing & regulatory standing (30 points)
    — whether the casino holds a valid licence in every market it actively serves, and the quality of those jurisdictions.
  • Enforcement & sanctions history (20 points)
    — regulator fines, suspensions, warnings and settlements over the last five years, weighted by severity and recency.
  • Complaint performance (18 points)
    — independent complaint volume, resolution rate, speed, and the share that remain unresolved.
  • Payout & withdrawal integrity (12 points)
    — measured withdrawal speed (from our own test panel and verified-member reports), withdrawal-related complaints, and the reasonableness of withdrawal limits.
  • Fairness & player protection (9 points)
    — independent game certification (eCOGRA, iTech Labs, GLI, BMM) and responsible-gambling tooling.
  • Transparency & corporate integrity (6 points)
    — disclosure of ownership and ultimate beneficial owners, and fairness of terms and conditions.
  • Verified member experience (5 points)
    — structured reviews from ProbityScore members whose play is independently verified.

Roughly two-thirds of the score (68 points) comes from official regulator and complaint data, deliberately. Member reviews are capped at 5 points so user-generated content informs the rating without dominating it.

How scores band

Score Band Meaning
90–100 Exemplary Top-tier licensing, clean enforcement, excellent complaint outcomes
75–89 Strong Well licensed and well run; minor issues only
60–74 Adequate Acceptable, with one or more areas warranting attention
40–59 Caution Material concerns in licensing, enforcement or complaints
0–39 High risk Serious, verifiable problems — e.g. unlicensed in a served market
— Unrated Insufficient verifiable data to publish a score

Hard gates: when a score is capped

Some facts are so material that a high weighted score would mislead readers. When any of these is true, the score is capped — and the triggering fact is shown on the operator’s page.

  • No valid licence in any market the operator actively serves — capped at 39.
  • Active licence suspension or revocation in a served market — capped at 25.
  • Enforcement for player-fund misappropriation or anti-money-laundering failure in the last 12 months — capped at 59.
  • A verified pattern of winnings confiscation, corroborated by multiple complaints or member reports — capped at 59.
  • Verifiable data covers less than the minimum threshold — published as “Unrated” rather than a misleading number.

Confidence: how sure we are

Every published score carries a confidence grade so readers know how much rests on official data versus our own collection.

  • A
    — at least 80% of inputs come from official, top-tier sources, with full pillar coverage.
  • B
    — 60 to 79% top-tier inputs, or one pillar only partially covered.
  • C
    — under 60% top-tier, or a score that depends heavily on our test panel or member reviews before corroboration.

Where the data comes from

Every input is sourced and dated; nothing is invented. We use three tiers of source.

Tier 1 — official regulator data and APIs

The UK Gambling Commission, Malta Gaming Authority, iGaming Ontario / AGCO, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, Sweden’s Spelinspektionen, the Curaçao Gaming Authority (post-LOK register), Companies House for corporate ownership, and Trustpilot’s developer API for an independent sentiment cross-check.

Tier 2 — reputable third-party structured data

Public complaint platforms (AskGamblers, Casino Guru, complaints.wiki) and independent game-certification laboratories (eCOGRA, iTech Labs, Gaming Laboratories International, BMM Testlabs).

Tier 3 — our own primary collection

ProbityScore’s withdrawal-test panel and structured reviews from our verified members.

Verified member reviews

User reviews are the easiest part of any review platform to game — which is why ours work differently. Every member review on ProbityScore is structured (rating fields across defined dimensions, not just star counts), weighted by how strongly the underlying play is verified, and cross-checked against official data.

There are three verification tiers, and only the top tier feeds the Payout pillar.

  • Account-verified
    — basic identity check. Lowest weight; the review is displayed but lightly weighted.
  • Deposit-verified
    — evidence the member actually funded an account at the operator. Medium weight.
  • Transaction-verified
    — evidence of a real deposit and withdrawal (e.g. an open-banking confirmation or a redacted statement). Highest weight, and the only tier whose reported payout times feed the Payout pillar.

Operators cannot solicit, filter, suppress, reward or pay for reviews — we control the review surface end to end, the opposite of the operator-driven invitation model used elsewhere. We apply outlier and coordination detection, recency decay, and one review per member per operator with an edit history. When member sentiment diverges materially from official complaint data, the divergence is flagged and dampened, and a human reviewer looks at it before either signal is trusted at face value.

Why we are independent

ProbityScore takes no affiliate commissions from any operator we rate, and accepts no paid placements. We are not paid to recommend, rank or hide anyone. The team that sells operator subscriptions and data licences has no ability to change a score: the scoring engine and the commercial team are firewalled, and that separation is published. This is the credible answer to the central conflict-of-interest problem in the wider casino-review category — and it is the reason ProbityScore exists.

How we stay defamation-safe

Everything we publish is a verifiable fact or a derived score from a published rule. We do not publish opinion-style characterisations such as “rogue” or “scam”; we state, for example, that an operator holds no licence in a market it serves, or that it was subject to a specific enforcement action in a given year. Every data point is timestamped with its source and retrieval date, so any claim can be substantiated.

Operators have a right of reply. Factual inputs can be corrected through our right-of-reply process; verified corrections recompute the score automatically, and the change is recorded in the operator’s history.

Versioning and change control

This is Methodology version 1.1. Material changes to weights, gates or data sources trigger a version bump, a public changelog entry, and a full recomputation of every operator’s score so the rating set stays internally consistent. Weights and thresholds are reviewed at least annually, and after any major regulatory shift.

Questions or corrections

Operators can request a review of factual inputs or initiate a right of reply via our For Operators page. Readers spotting an error can use the same contact route. We publish corrections on the operator’s page and update the score history.

ProbityScore — independent trust ratings for regulated online casinos. No affiliate commissions, no paid placements, ever.