PAGCOR publishes four public surfaces and a licence number in none of them. What it does publish is the list of domains each brand may operate, and that is the check that actually works.
Published 2026-08-14Not changed since publicationNo review date set yetSources not re-read since publication
This piece is about Philippines and is written for readers there. Rules, ages and licence classes differ by country and nothing here transfers to another one.
None of those four surfaces publishes a licence number. Not one.
This matters more than it sounds. A Philippine brand can be matched to its licensee, confirmed against the regulator’s own document, and dated, and still have nothing to print in the number slot, because the regulator does not issue a public one. So a site that displays a "PAGCOR licence number" beside a domestic Philippine brand is displaying something the regulator does not publish, and the reader has no way to check it.
Our own record for BingoPlus stores that absence as an absence: the licensee is AB Leisure Exponent, Inc., the register entry is dated, and the number reads "not published" rather than being left blank or filled in. A blank looks like an oversight. "Not published" is a finding.
The 2024 URL register is the most useful document PAGCOR publishes, and it has nothing to do with numbers. It lists, per brand, the internet domains that brand is permitted to operate.
For BingoPlus that list runs to `bingoplus.ph`, `bingoplus.com`, `bingoplus.net`, `bingoplus.com.ph` and `bingoplus.online`, three subdomains, four app-download domains, and separately `fishplus.ph` and `minesplus.ph`. A site that looks like the brand and sits on a domain that is not on the list is not the brand.
That is the check, and it is a gate rather than a reference: it can rule a site out. It rules a site in less strongly, because the register is dated 6 August 2024 and the brand register beside it is fourteen months newer: a domain added since then would be absent from a document that is simply older, not wrong. Presence is strong evidence. Absence is a question, and the question is worth asking before depositing anywhere.
The minimum age for online casino play on a licensed Philippine platform is 21, and operators are required to verify identity against a government-issued document before a first deposit. The age also carries a nationality dimension that is not cosmetic: the Philippine framework has always distinguished who may play what, by nationality and by licence class.
This is the single most common factual error on Philippine-facing gambling pages. One site in our competitive review displays an 18+ badge directly above a correctly quoted 21+ statute, on the same screen. We publish 21 on Philippine pages and nothing else, and our validator treats an 18+ badge in this market as a defect rather than a style choice.
The POGO designation has been abolished and replaced by the Internet Gaming Licensee class. The live distinction is between domestic-facing platforms, which may serve Filipino residents, and IGL, which is a different thing entirely. Any copy still using "POGO" as a current category is out of date rather than merely old-fashioned.
The distinction is where the enforcement is. The regulatory action on record targets the promotion of unlicensed platforms, including by individual social-media promoters, rather than promotion as such. Two further constraints travel with it: credit-card funding of gambling accounts is banned, and gambling advertising is required to carry National Problem Gambling Helpline messaging. Those are the rules a Philippine page has to meet before its content is even considered.
The registers above were read directly from the regulator’s own domain. Almost nothing else here was that clean, and the limits belong on the page rather than in a file nobody opens.
PAGCOR’s own site returns 403 to an ordinary automated request; the register PDFs were reachable only with a browser user-agent, and the national news agency’s site refused us outright.
The advertising measures in the previous section come from regulatory reporting rather than from the regulator’s own host, and we have not confirmed them against a primary text. PAGCOR’s charter citation is widely repeated and we have not verified it, so we do not print it.
The ₱49,999 transaction cap that appears across Philippine brand pages has no explanation we can source. The anti-money-laundering threshold usually offered for it is wrong, since the casino reporting threshold is ₱5,000,000, so the cap is more likely a payment-rail limit and we record it as unexplained rather than guessing.
And every registered BingoPlus host answered 403 to us, so we have no reading of the operator’s own site at all: no payment rails, no verification flow, no bonus terms, no support hours. That is stored as nothing rather than as "the operator does not publish it", because we do not know that. We could not read it, which is a fact about our request and not about the site.
One question is still open and it is the important one: whether PAGCOR’s B2B accreditation framework, which names gaming affiliates among third-party providers, binds an editorial publisher like this one or only supply-chain vendors. We have not closed it.
This article is filed against the Philippines and only the Philippines. That is not a tag; it is a switch. Every market in our system carries a flag that decides whether anything about it may be published at all, and a page bound to a market whose flag is off does not render anywhere (no list, no sitemap, no internal link) while remaining in our database with its research intact.
We built it that way because two of the three markets this project started with prohibit the promotion of online gambling, which is the activity a site like this performs. If the Philippines ever joins them, this page disappears on the flag rather than surviving as a quietly reworded version of itself.
On a PAGCOR-licensed domestic platform, for players aged 21 and over who have verified their identity, yes. That is a narrower statement than "online casino is legal here", and the difference between the two is the whole of this article.
Answered for Philippines
There is no public one. We checked all four PAGCOR surfaces on 14 August 2026 and none publishes a licence number for a domestic brand. A site showing you one is showing you something you cannot verify.
Answered for Philippines
PAGCOR publishes the domains each brand may operate. If the site you are on is not on that list, it is not that brand. The list is dated August 2024, so a newer domain may be missing from it. Treat absence as a question rather than a verdict.
Answered for Philippines
No. It was abolished and replaced by the Internet Gaming Licensee class, which is not the same thing as a domestic-facing licence. Copy that still uses POGO as a current category is out of date.
Answered for Philippines
Twenty-one. Not eighteen. Operators must verify a government-issued identity document before your first deposit, and the rule carries a nationality dimension depending on the licence class of the platform.
Answered for Philippines
Not a bibliography — these are the addresses behind the numbers this site stores about the 1 record this piece is about, with the date we read each one. Anything the article argues from that we have not stored as a figure is not in this list, and we would rather say that than pad it.
Nothing on this page has been corrected since it was published on 2026-08-14. When something is, it is listed here with the date and what changed — not quietly edited. How we handle a correction.
A PDF titled the List of Internet Gaming Licensees still returns HTTP 200 on PAGCOR's own site in September 2026, nineteen months after the licence class it names stopped legally existing.
Presidential Decree 1602 dates to 1978, decades before online betting existed, yet its bettor clause and a 2012 cybercrime law together decide whether a player's own bet is the offence.
Manila law firm Respicio & Co., in a commentary published 6 May 2026, names six lawful reasons a licensed Philippine casino can delay a withdrawal, and the point where a delay stops being one of them.
PAGCOR's own accredited-brands register lists OKBet under a company called Gavin Ventures, entry 13 of roughly sixty, in a file sorted by administrator rather than by the name printed on a casino's own homepage.