Julien Larocque
I check credentials for a living, which mostly means reading a line of small grey text in a footer and then going somewhere else to find out whether it is true. The work is unglamorous and the answer is usually available in about five minutes. What surprises people is how often nobody has looked.
What I cover here
Issuer-side verification. Which body granted a credential, what that body's own published conditions require of a licensee, what the three data points on a licence line are for, and how a reader checks a claim against the issuer instead of against the graphic beside it. The Curacao transition to a single issuing authority and the January 2025 expiry of the old sub-licences is the change I have spent the most time on, because it turned a sentence thousands of pages still print into a dated claim.
What I do not cover
I am not a provincial licensing authority and I do not present as one. I do not run complaint escalations, I do not interpret the Criminal Code, I do not write about deposit limits or self-exclusion tooling, and I do not benchmark payout speed or argue about return percentages. Those are other people's specialisms and pretending otherwise would be the same failure I write about.
How I work
I read the framework rather than the summary, because a summary is usually a few years old and frameworks get amended. Kahnawake's was amended in March 2026. I quote what an operator publishes, in the currency it publishes it in, with the date I captured it. Where I could not verify something I say so on the page, which is why one brand in our lineup carries no bonus figure and why our comparison table has a column headed "what we could not".
Corrections are welcome at [email protected].