Our methodology

What we publish

bets.cy only shows companies with an active Class B licence from the National Betting Authority (NBA). We do not accept bets and we do not rank companies: our lists are alphabetical.

Our sources

• Class B register (nba.gov.cy): we read it every night. We keep the legal entity, trade name, licence number, licensed domain, licence period, registration number and registered address, exactly as the NBA publishes them.
• Blocking list (BlockingListLatest.txt): we download it every week. The first line of the file gives the date of the update, which we show with every answer.
• Licence PDFs: we link to the official file of each licence as the NBA publishes it.

Data rules

1. Every fact has a source link and a checked date.
2. Anything not yet verified appears as “[TO BE VERIFIED]” and never as a value. The website build fails if a published fact has no source or no date.
3. When a licence expires with no new period in the register, the company is hidden automatically from every list, page and advertisement. With fewer than 90 days left, we show “Expires in N days”.

How the address check works

1. We clean up the address: we remove https, www, the path, the port and a trailing dot, convert it to lower case and to punycode.
2. Legal: an exact match with the licensed domain of a company with an active licence.
3. Legal, expiring soon: the same, with fewer than 90 days left.
4. On the blocking list: the domain or any of its parent domains is on the list.
5. No licence: it isn’t found anywhere. That doesn’t make it safe, and a .com.cy ending on its own proves nothing.

How we read the NBA’s websites

We send at most one request per second, with a User-Agent that identifies us and gives a contact address, we keep a copy of the responses and we never get around access restrictions. If the NBA refuses a request, we stop.