Methodology / Document 01

Evidence standards

Every record on GambleLABS NETWORK carries an evidence level, stored on the record and shown to the reader. The level is not a badge of quality — it is a statement of what kind of proof sits underneath, so that a reader can weigh a claim without taking our word for it.

DocumentedCorroboratedSingle sourceNot applicable

01The scale

The four levels

These are the only four values a record can hold. There is no fifth level for material we would like to publish but cannot support — that material is not published.

DocumentedLevel 01

Every material claim is supported by a primary document held on file.

What it requires: Every material claim is supported by a primary document held on file — the regulator’s own notice, the register entry, the filed accounts, the court judgment, the operator’s own published terms. The document is archived at the point of use, so the record survives the page being taken down.
What it permits: Naming a company. Describing an action a named authority took. Stating a licence status, a penalty, an ownership link or a corporate relationship as fact.
What it still forbids: Nothing beyond the documents themselves. A documented record still cannot assert motive, intent or a state of mind that no document evidences.
Typical records: Enforcement actions, licence records, ownership chains drawn from filings, domain warning-list entries.

CorroboratedLevel 02

Material claims are supported by two or more independent sources.

What it requires: Material claims are supported by two or more sources that are genuinely independent of one another. Two outlets reprinting the same agency wire is one source. Two companies in the same corporate group is one source. Independence means the second source could have been wrong without the first being wrong.
What it permits: Naming a company. Describing a pattern of behaviour, a practice or a sequence of events where no single document captures the whole of it.
What it still forbids: Presenting an inference as a finding. Where the two sources agree on facts but not on their significance, the record reports the disagreement.
Typical records: Investigations that assemble a picture from filings, player evidence and technical records; cross-jurisdiction operating patterns.

Single sourceLevel 03

Rests on one source. Stated openly so readers can weigh it accordingly.

What it requires: Rests on one source, and says so in the record itself rather than in a footnote. Publishable only when the source is identified, its interest in the matter is disclosed, and the claim is material enough that withholding it would mislead readers more than publishing it.
What it permits: Reporting what the single source states, attributed to it. Reporting a document’s existence and contents where the document is what we hold.
What it still forbids: Naming a company as having done something wrong on one uncorroborated account. Where the single source is a person rather than a document, the claim is reported as an account, not as an established fact.
Typical records: A regulator’s statement that no other body has yet confirmed; a filing that contradicts the public position of the company that filed it.

Not applicableLevel 04

Explanatory or definitional material that makes no factual claim about a named party.

What it requires: Explanatory or definitional material that makes no factual claim about any named party — how a white-label arrangement works, what a chargeback is, what a licence condition means in practice.
What it permits: Publishing on day one, with no source list, because there is no third-party fact being asserted.
What it still forbids: Naming any company at all. The moment a definition acquires an example with a real name attached, the record leaves this level and takes on the standard the example requires.
Typical records: Player guides, structural explainers, glossary material, GambleLABS’ own policy writing — including this page.

The level is set by the editor who signs the record off, not by the writer who drafted it, and it is stored as a constrained value in the database rather than as free text. A record cannot be published without one.

02Definition

What counts as a primary document

The word ‘primary’ does a lot of work in this policy, so it is defined narrowly.

A primary document is one produced by the party with direct knowledge of the fact, in the ordinary course of its own business or duty — not a description of that document written by somebody else.

Accepted as primary

A regulator’s own publication — a licence register entry, an enforcement notice, a public warning list, a published decision or a sanctions notice, retrieved from the authority’s own domain.
A court or tribunal record — a judgment, an order, a filed pleading or a published case summary from the court itself.
A corporate filing — incorporation records, annual accounts, shareholder or beneficial-ownership filings, prospectuses and regulatory disclosures held by a companies registry or a securities regulator.
A company’s own statement about itself — its terms and conditions, its licence footer, its published policies, a signed statement to us, a filing signed by an officer.
A technical record we can reproduce — DNS and WHOIS data, certificate transparency entries, a captured HTTP response, a payment descriptor on a bank statement supplied as evidence. Reproducible means a competent third party following the same method would obtain the same result.

Not primary, whatever its quality

A news report describing any of the above. It may be accurate, it may be the only route we have to the document, and it is still a secondary source — we record it as one and we go and find the document.
A press release announcing a regulatory outcome. The regulator’s notice is the record; the release is the subject’s account of it.
An industry database, affiliate listing or licence-badge widget. These are aggregations of unknown provenance and go stale silently.
A machine-generated summary — including one produced by the Evidence Engine. The engine points at documents; it never stands in for one.

Retrieval and archiving

A document is recorded with its publisher, its publication date where one is stated, the date we retrieved it and an archive snapshot. Regulators reorganise their sites, take notices down after an appeal period and move registers behind search forms. A claim whose only support is a URL that no longer resolves is an unsupported claim, so the snapshot is captured at the moment of use rather than when the link breaks.

The test we actually apply

Could a reader who distrusts GambleLABS entirely reach the same conclusion using only the documents we have named — without asking us for anything, and without needing to believe us about any step?

If the answer is no, the record is not ready, regardless of how confident the desk is.

03The weakest publishable level

When one source is enough

Single-source publication is a deliberate exception, not a shortcut. These are the conditions, all of which must hold.

Conditions, all required

01
The source is identified in the record
Named, or — where a person is at risk — described precisely enough that a reader can judge their position without learning who they are. ‘Sources say’ is not a source.
02
Its interest is disclosed
A former employee in litigation with the subject, a competitor, a claimant awaiting payment: each may be telling the truth, and the reader is told what they stand to gain.
03
The claim is material
Withholding it would leave readers with a materially misleading picture. We do not publish thinly-sourced colour because it is interesting.
04
The subject has been approached
The named party has had the claim put to it, in specific terms, with time to answer. A refusal to comment is recorded as such.
05
Corroboration has been attempted and failed
The record states what we tried — which register we searched, which authority we asked, which document we requested — and what came back.

How it must be labelled

A single-source record carries the Single source level on its evidence panel, at the top of the record, in the same place a documented record carries its own. The label is not smaller, not collapsed and not placed at the foot of the page.

The claim itself is written so that its status is legible in the sentence rather than only in the metadata. We write that a named body states something, or that a document records something, and we attribute the claim in the same breath as we make it. Where the source is a single person, the record says that it rests on one account.

If the claim is later corroborated, the record is upgraded and the upgrade is logged. If it is later contradicted, we issue a correction against the record — we do not quietly downgrade the label and hope nobody kept a copy.

What single-source never buys

One account is never enough to describe a named company as having acted dishonestly, unlawfully or in breach of its licence. That threshold sits below, and it does not move.

04Identification

Before we name a company

Naming the wrong company is the most common way this kind of work causes real damage. Brand names are recycled, licences are shared, and the entity a player deals with is frequently not the one on the homepage.

Before a company appears by name in any record, we require a durable identifier tying the name to a legal person: a company registration number from the registry of its stated jurisdiction, a licence number from a named authority’s register, or a court reference. A matching trading name is not an identifier.

Where a brand is operated under a white-label or platform arrangement, the record separates the layers explicitly — the brand a player sees, the licensee named on the register, the platform supplying the system and the company taking the payment. Where we cannot yet establish which layer is which, the record says the relationship is unestablished rather than guessing at it.

Entity dossiers state their own completeness. A dossier marked as a stub is telling the reader that we have confirmed the identity and little else — it is not a judgement on the company, and it should not be read as one.

Names we do not publish

Private individuals who are not officers, licensees or otherwise accountable for the conduct described. Staff members named in a player’s correspondence are redacted.
Companies identified only by inference — shared hosting, a reused template, a similar terms-and-conditions document. Shared infrastructure is recorded as shared infrastructure, which is a fact, rather than as common ownership, which is a conclusion.
Reporters, complainants and their family members, in any circumstance, without explicit and specific consent.

Where the risk actually is

Two companies sharing a name in different registries is ordinary, not suspicious. Most of the harm we could do would come from attaching a real regulatory action to the wrong legal person with a similar name — which is why identification is a separate test from evidence, applied before the claim is even considered.

05The higher bar

Before we describe conduct

Recording that something happened is one standard. Describing what a named party did — and, worse, why — is another. The second is materially harder to meet, and we treat it that way.

Tier 1

Facts of record

An authority issued a notice. A licence status changed on a register. A judgment was handed down. A domain appeared on a warning list. Requires the primary document and correct identification of the party — nothing further.

Tier 2

Conduct

A named party did something: withheld funds, applied a term that was not disclosed, operated without the licence its market requires. Requires documentary evidence of the acts themselves plus corroboration, and the subject must have been put to the specifics and given a stated period to answer.

Tier 3

Intent and pattern

A named party acted deliberately, systematically or dishonestly. Requires evidence of the intent itself — internal documents, an admission, a finding by a court or regulator, or a pattern documented across enough independent instances that coincidence is not a serious explanation. Our own inference is not evidence, and we do not publish it as though it were.

Two rules cut across all three tiers. First, an allegation is reported as an allegation and attributed to whoever makes it — a regulator, a court, a claimant — never adopted as our own conclusion because we find it persuasive. Second, where a party has answered, its answer is published alongside the claim at the same prominence, and the record notes if the answer went unaddressed.

Regulatory outcomes are reported with their procedural status attached: a notice under appeal is not a final finding, a settlement is not an admission unless the settlement says so, and a lapsed licence is not a revoked one. These distinctions are load-bearing and we do not compress them for readability.

06The default

When a claim cannot be corroborated

This is the part of the standard that costs us stories.

The rule

We do not publish it.

Not as a question. Not as a hint. Not as an unnamed example in an explainer. Not as a partially redacted case study that anyone in the market could identify. Not with enough surrounding detail that a reader can work out who is meant.

What we do instead is keep the file. The sources gathered stay on record, the reporter’s account stays private and the work stays open. If a register entry changes, a regulator publishes, a filing lands or a second account arrives independently, the file is reassessed against this same standard. Plenty of files never move again, and that is an acceptable outcome.

Where a pattern is real but unpublishable in specific terms, it can still inform work that names nobody: a jurisdiction profile, an explainer on how a payment route fails, a description of a structure. That work is published at the Not applicable level precisely because it names no party — and it does not carry identifying detail smuggled in as illustration.

We also tell the person who brought it to us. A reporter whose account we cannot corroborate is told plainly that we cannot publish, what would change that, and which authority or dispute-resolution route may still be open to them. Their report stays private either way.

Next: source standards Right of reply