The Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA) is the public body that licenses and supervises games of chance offered from Curaçao, a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the southern Caribbean. Its licensees are mostly online gambling businesses: online casinos, sports betting sites and the software suppliers behind them. It exists because Curaçao has been one of the most widely used licensing bases for internet gambling since the 1990s.
The CGA took its current form when the National Ordinance on Games of Chance, known by its Dutch abbreviation LOK, came into force on 24 December 2024. It continues the work of the Gaming Control Board, a foundation set up in 1999, but with wider statutory powers over licensing, supervision and enforcement. A CGA licence is the classic example of an offshore gaming license: it authorises an operator to run gambling from Curaçao, not to serve players in countries that require a licence of their own.
Curaçao Gaming Authority in plain terms
Think of the CGA as the office that issues trading permits in a small port town that many merchants use as their mailing address. The permit says the merchant is registered and checked in that town. It does not give the merchant the right to open a stall in every other town the ships sail to; those towns have their own rules and their own permit offices.
For years, the town did not even issue the permits itself. A few private permit holders resold rights to hundreds of merchants, and outsiders could see very little about who stood behind each stall. The 2024 law took that resale arrangement away and put the town office back in charge of every permit directly.
From master licences to the LOK
Online gambling in Curaçao was originally governed by the National Ordinance on Offshore Games of Hazard of 1993. Under that system the government issued a small number of master licences, usually cited as four, to private companies. Each master licence holder could then grant sublicences to operators, so thousands of gambling websites ran under a handful of master licences. The model was cheap and quick, but the regulator had little direct contact with the operators, and public information on who owned them was thin.
Pressure for reform came from the Netherlands, other European regulators, payment providers and international bodies concerned with anti-money laundering (AML) standards. From 2023 the Gaming Control Board began accepting direct applications, and operators holding sublicences were told to move to a direct licence. The LOK, passed by Curaçao's parliament in December 2024, completed the change: every operator offering games of chance from Curaçao needs its own non-transferable licence from the CGA, and the sublicence route was closed.
Licences and supervision
Under the LOK the CGA issues licences for business-to-consumer operators, which take bets from players, and for business-to-business suppliers of games and platforms. Applicants go through a fit-and-proper review covering:
- Ownership and control. Applicants disclose their ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), directors and key management personnel, with identity and background documents.
- Financial standing. The authority asks for source of funds and source of wealth evidence for the people financing the business.
- Compliance programme. Licensees must run know your customer (KYC) checks, transaction monitoring, player protection and AML controls proportionate to their risk.
- Local substance. The ordinance expects real presence in Curaçao, including local key persons, rather than a mailbox.
The CGA can attach conditions, request information, impose fines and suspend or withdraw licences. A gambling licence does not cover the movement of player money: deposits and withdrawals are handled by banks, payment service providers and acquirers that answer to their own supervisors, which is why gaming payment licences and the CGA licence are separate questions.
The 2025–2026 licensing portal breach
In October 2026 the CGA confirmed that an unauthorised party had accessed its online licensing portal between December 2025 and September 2026. Trade press and investigative media reported that application files, including ownership records and identity documents of licence holders, were copied and published by a Berlin-based security researcher and media partners. The CGA filed complaints in several countries, ended its relationship with the outside company that ran the portal and opened a temporary replacement, while stating that existing licences remained valid.
The episode is a prominent example of a regulatory data breach. For banks and payment firms, it turned information that had been confidential into material they can compare against their own customer due diligence files, which raised the cost of opaque ownership and nominee owner structures.
Criticism and market position
Critics long described Curaçao as a light-touch jurisdiction whose paper was easy to obtain and was used to reach players in countries where the operator held no local licence. Some commentators applied the label license mill to the old sublicensing trade. Supporters of the reform argue that the LOK brings Curaçao closer to regulators such as the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) and the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), at least on paper.
In practice, the value of a CGA licence depends on how others treat it. Countries with their own licensing regimes use geo-blocking orders, payment blocking and advertising bans against offshore sites, and banks may apply de-risking to the whole licence class. Operators that rely only on a Curaçao licence therefore often depend on high-risk acquirers or crypto payment routes, which keeps the jurisdiction under scrutiny from AML supervisors and card schemes.