ADM concession: what it is, how to check it and who does not have one

Two questions are constantly confused: «does this site open from Italy?» and «does this operator have an ADM concession?». They are different questions, with two different sources, and the answer to one does not anticipate the answer to the other.

This page keeps the two things separate. On the one hand the concession, which is a legal relationship verifiable in a public list; on the other the licences that foreign operators declare in their own documents, read across a hundred brands on 26 August 2026.

Whoever does not have the concession does not have an Italian body the player can turn to either, and the matter is taken up in who to turn to when the operator is not ADM. The brands outside the concession system that accept cryptocurrencies are compared in best Bitcoin casinos in Italy. The full comparison is in best crypto casinos.

What a concession is, and why it is not a sticker

Remote gaming in Italy is a licensed market. The Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli — which took over from the Amministrazione Autonoma dei Monopoli di Stato, hence the acronym AAMS still in common use — entrusts the taking of bets to parties that sign a concession relationship with it. Casino, poker, bingo and betting fall within that perimeter.

The practical consequence is that the licence holder is not simply «authorised»: it is a contractual counterparty of the Agency, bound by obligations that the Agency itself enforces. Offering remote gaming to Italian players without a concession is unlawful for the operator.

A licence mark at the bottom of the home page is not an element of this relationship. It is text published by the operator on a page the operator controls.

The three checks possible from the outside, in order of strength

The check that decides is only one: the list of licence holders published by the Agency. An operator is either on that list or it is not, and the document counts for more than any statement on the operator’s site.

The other two are useful clues when you are looking at a page in a hurry. The first is the domain: licensed betting in Italy takes place on national domains, and an operator presenting itself as a licence holder from an international domain deserves a check before anything else. The second is the concession number: whoever has one displays it, together with the reference to the Agency, in a verifiable way.

A clue helps you decide where to look. It does not replace the list.

Which bodies issued the licences of the hundred brands read

In the reference library — a hundred brands, documents read on 26 August 2026 — no brand declares an Italian concession. The licence number appears in 68 cases out of 100 and the bodies named break down as follows:

Body named in the documents	Brands
Curaçao Gaming Authority	37
Anjouan Gaming Board	25
Other wordings referring to Curaçao (Antillephone N.V., Curaçao eGaming, «Curaçao», Government of Curaçao)	4
Government of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan, Union of the Comoros	1
M.I.S.A.	1
No number published	32

No European Union body appears in this column. ADM does not appear, and Malta, Spain and France do not appear among the brands read.

The thirty-two brands without a number are not the worst part of the list: they are the part about which nothing can be said. Absence of the information and absence of the licence are two distinct statements, and only the first is recorded here. How to trace a number back to the company that holds it is the subject of the page on the multiplication of brands and domains.

Why «not on the list of blocked sites» does not mean «licence holder»

The Agency also publishes a list of gambling domains without an Italian concession, towards which providers redirect anyone who tries to open them. The version checked for this site counted 12,638 domains as at 21 August 2026.

Comparing that list with the 82 brands in the table on the home page, the result was: 48 with the main domain present on the list, 8 with only the main domain absent but with back-up domains present, 26 with no domain present as at the date of the check.

Those 26 are not 26 licence holders. They are 26 domains that as at the date of the check had not yet been added to a blocking list, which is information about the list, not about the operator.

The confusion between the two is the most widespread error in Italian rankings, and it comes from using as positive proof a document that is by construction a list of negative cases. The list of licence holders lists who is there; the list of blocked sites lists some of those who are not.

What changes, in concrete terms, on the account

On the concession side, identity enters at the start: registration requires a tax code and an identity document, and an anonymous account at a concession-holder does not exist. On the non-concession side, identity enters later and at the operator’s discretion: the verification clause, read in 49 brands out of 100, leaves the decision to the operator in all 49 cases. The moment-by-moment comparison is on the page about registration and tax code.

The second difference concerns the money: a licensed gaming account is denominated in euros, a balance with a foreign operator is denominated in a coin that has to be bought and sold back. The count of the steps is in the page from the euro to the cryptocurrency.

What has not been verified on this page

The content of the individual concession deeds has not been reconstructed, nor has the total number of licence holders active at the date of writing: neither of these two figures is therefore claimed here.

Of the hundred brands in the library, 38 were read on the live documents, 41 on an archived copy of the same pages and 21 did not open at all. For those 21 all the fields are empty, and empty means «not read», never «absent».

The overall picture of the documents read is in the site's home page.