Methodology

Signals are grouped into six categories. Each category is scored from 0 to 100 as a weighted average of its signals, then categories are combined using the weights below to produce the headline trust score.

Regulatory standing carries the highest weight because a casino operating without a credible licence collapses every other signal - you have no enforcement path if something goes wrong.

Each signal is one of three shapes:

• Binary - present or absent (e.g. “published RNG audit from a recognised firm”). Scored 0 or 100.
• Tiered - discrete levels (e.g. licence quality: tier-1 EU regulator > tier-2 > offshore-only). Each level maps to a fixed score.
• Quantitative - a measured number (e.g. average payout time, complaint resolution rate) normalised to a 0–100 scale against a published reference range.

A small number of signals are negative - for example, “unresolved regulator action in the past 24 months.” For these, the raw score is inverted (100 − score) so that a higher category score still means “more trustworthy.”

Every signal must point to a primary source - a regulator’s licensee register, an audit firm’s published report, an ownership filing, or a press release from the operator itself. Secondary aggregators (other review sites) are not accepted as sources.

The verification date is the day a human (or, for some quantitative signals, a verified scrape) checked that the source still says what we say it says. We surface the date on every signal row so you can decide whether it’s recent enough for your purposes.

Each signal has a stale_after_days window appropriate to how fast it can change in the real world:

• Licence status - 30 days. Regulators can revoke or suspend quickly.
• RNG / fairness audits - 365 days. Annual review cadence.
• Ownership disclosure - 180 days. Changes when corporate structure or M&A activity warrants.
• Payout-time observations - 60 days. Short window because operator behaviour can shift after a payments-provider change.

A signal past its window is flagged stale on the breakdown and is excluded from the headline number until it’s re-verified.

The headline trust score (0–100) maps to a tier label. Tiers are a summary, not a substitute for reading the breakdown:

Trust scores are a measure of verifiable trust, not a recommendation. They do not capture:

• Whether the casino is legal in your jurisdiction - that’s your responsibility to check.
• Game library, bonus competitiveness, UI quality, or app performance. Plenty of trustworthy casinos are unpleasant to use, and vice versa.
• Future behaviour. Operators change. The score reflects what is verifiable today.
• Anything that exists only in private - internal compliance programmes, unpublished regulator correspondence, and so on.

If a source is broken, a verification date is wrong, or a signal assessment doesn’t match the source it cites, please email corrections@trustcasino.online. We treat operator-flagged corrections the same as user-flagged ones: show us the source, and we’ll re-verify.