SportyBet Ghana vs Betum: One Appears on Ghana’s Register Twice, the Other Not at All

Compared by Alex Mensah · Last updated: 27 September 2026 · Neither operator scored

What we did, and what we could not do

SportyBet requires a Ghanaian mobile number to register and we do not hold one, so we could not deposit, bet or request a payout there. Betum requires only an email address, but we did not fund an account at a brand we cannot find on the regulator’s register, and we are not going to publish figures from an account we never opened.

What we did do: we worked through both registration flows to the point where they stopped us, read both operators’ published terms and licence disclosures line by line, opened SportyBet’s live chat, and checked both brands against the Commission’s register. Every screenshot on this page is ours, captured on 10 September 2026. We have written to SportyBet requesting a test account, and if it agrees we will run the full protocol and publish a scored review.

Those two forms are the clearest single illustration of the difference between these brands. SportyBet’s wall exists because the operator is licensed to serve one country and checks that you are in it. Betum’s absence of a wall exists because the operator serves many countries from one platform and sorts out where you are later. Neither approach is automatically better for you, but they are not the same thing, and the second one means nobody has confirmed at sign-up that the product you are using is one you are permitted to use.

One small detail on Betum’s form is worth reading twice. The age confirmation asks you to agree that you are over 18 and under 75. An upper age limit in a gambling account is unusual and we have not seen the reasoning published anywhere.

The headline finding

The Gaming Commission of Ghana licenses by activity rather than by brand, and it runs separate categories for sports betting and for online casino. On the register covering 1 January to 31 December 2026, SportyBet appears twice, once under Sports Betting and once under Online Casino, both entries recorded in Accra. That is a complete confirmation for both halves of what the brand offers. We searched the register again for both names on 27 September 2026 and the result had not changed.

Betum does not appear on that register at all. Not under Online Casino, not under Sports Betting, not under Remote Interactive Games, not under any of the seven categories. Neither does Pulsiora Ltd, the company named in its footer, although the register carries no company-name column, so that second search was never going to produce a result on its own.

We want to be precise about what this does and does not mean. It does not mean Betum is breaking a law, and it is not our place to say whether it is. Ghana’s rules address who may be licensed to offer gambling in the country; how they apply to an offshore site that accepts Ghanaian players without a Ghanaian licence is a question for the Commission rather than for us, and the Commission has published no statement on it that we could find. What the absence does mean is concrete and narrow: if something goes wrong at Betum, the Ghanaian regulator has no licence of its own to act on.

What each operator publishes about its own licence

Here is where the comparison stops being one-sided, and we think this is the part most reviews would leave out. On disclosure alone, Betum’s footer tells you more than SportyBet’s does. It names Pulsiora Ltd, gives a company registration number, gives a street address in Orange Walk Town in Belize, cites the statute its licence is issued under, gives the licence number and gives the date it expires.

SportyBet’s footer names the Gaming Act 2006 and licence number 0000237, and stops. No company. No address. Its About Us page adds one line, that SportyBet Ltd trades as SportyBet Ghana, and still gives no address. When we compared Betway against 22Bet on this site, the thing that separated them was that Betway published a company and a street in Accra which a Commission document from four years earlier independently confirmed. SportyBet publishes neither.

So the two brands fail in opposite directions. One holds the licences and describes itself thinly. The other describes itself fully and holds a licence from somewhere else entirely.

SportyBet publishes three different licence identifiers

This is the sort of thing you only notice by checking more than one place, so it is worth setting out plainly.

Three channels, three formats. The prefixes on the app pair follow the convention every other operator we have checked uses, where GCSB denotes sports betting and GCCA denotes casino, and the 24 in the middle matches the pattern where the year sits after the prefix. The website number follows no pattern we recognise from any other operator.

We are not suggesting any of these numbers is invented. We have no basis for that and neither does anyone else, because the Commission’s 2026 register does not publish licence numbers at all. Every 2026 Ghanaian licence number in circulation, including the ones on this page and on our 22Bet and Betway comparison, came from an operator rather than from the regulator. What we are saying is narrower: three different identifiers on three channels means at least two of them are stale, and there is no published scheme that lets a member of the public tell which.

How Ghana actually licenses a gambling operator

The Commission licenses under the Gaming Act 2006, Act 721, and it licenses by activity. A company applies for permission to run a specific kind of gambling business, and that permission covers that activity and not the others. An operator that wants to take football bets and also run slots needs two separate licences, applied for and renewed independently. The register reflects this: it does not list brands, it lists licences, one row per activity, so a brand licensed for two things appears twice.

Those counts come to 85, which is the number of rows in the table we hold. SportyBet is one of the twenty names in the Online Casino column. That is the whole finding, and it is why the practical question is never whether a brand is licensed in Ghana but what it is licensed for.

What an Anjouan licence is, and what we could establish about it

Betum’s footer says the site is licensed in the State of Anjouan under the Computer Gaming Licensing Act 007 of 2005, licence number ALSI-202603026-FI1, valid until 13 March 2027, and adds that this can be verified in the official Anjouan Gaming License Register. We went and tried.

We could not match that number to an entry. The Anjouan register we reached is searchable by licence number, company name or domain, and it does return results for other operators, listing names, numbers, status and dates. Searching for the number in Betum’s footer, and separately for Pulsiora and for betum.com, produced no matching entry in the data we were able to see. We are not in a position to say the licence does not exist. We are in a position to say the check the footer invites you to perform did not work when we performed it.

Behind that sits a larger question about the jurisdiction itself, and here we are going to be careful about who says what, because this is an area where reviews routinely overstate.

• What the source about gambling says. The 2024 GIABA mutual evaluation of the Comoros, adopted at GIABA’s plenary and published by the FATF, records that gambling is prohibited under the Comorian penal code at union level, which is why no assessment of the gaming sector was carried out at all. In other words, there is no national regulated gambling sector for an Anjouan gambling licence to sit inside. This is the finding that speaks directly to what Betum’s licence is worth.
• What a banking source says. The Central Bank of the Comoros published a notice, republished by the Comoros Ministry of Finance on 10 December 2025, naming the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority and Anjouan Corporates Services among what it calls fictitious structures, stating that these bodies and the offshore entities they have approved operate illegally, and confirming that it has referred the matter to prosecutors in Moroni, Mutsamudu and Moheli. That notice concerns banking and financial institutions, which is the Central Bank’s remit. It does not mention gambling licences.
• What that notice does not name. It does not name Anjouan Licensing Services, the body whose initials open the licence number in Betum’s footer. The connection between the two is reported rather than official: an ABC News investigation published on 31 December 2025 found that Anjouan Licensing Services cites the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority as the basis of its own authority, and quoted a former Comorian attorney-general describing it as an illegal entity.
• What the same investigation reports about the authority. That the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority was set up by a separatist administration in the late 1990s and was stripped of its status as a recognised regulator by Comorian banking laws passed in 2013 and 2015, but has continued to maintain a register regardless. The statute cited in Betum’s footer dates from that same period.
• What no source says. The Gaming Commission of Ghana has published no statement, warning list or blocking action concerning Anjouan-licensed operators or this brand. Nobody has acted against Betum in Ghana that we could find, and we are not implying that anyone has.

Put together, the honest summary is this. A Ghanaian licence is issued by a regulator that publishes a register you can check, sits in the country you live in, and takes complaints at an address in Accra. Betum’s licence is issued in the name of an island whose national penal code prohibits gambling, by a body outside Ghana whose closest institutional relative the national central bank has publicly disowned in its notices on banking, and that body’s register did not return a result for the number Betum publishes. Those two things are not equivalent, whatever a review that earns a commission on the second one tells you.

What Betum’s own terms say about your money

We read Betum’s Terms and Conditions in full. The page records a last update of 27 August 2026. Nothing below is our interpretation of a licence or our opinion of a jurisdiction; it is what the operator has written down about the contract you enter when you deposit.

That last row is not a gotcha, it is standard for offshore licensing, but it is worth pausing on. The place whose law governs your account is a place whose residents are not allowed to hold one.

What happens if something goes wrong

Nobody enjoys reading this part until they need it, at which point it is the only part that matters. With either operator the first step is the same: complain to the operator in writing and keep every reference number. Most disputes end here, and no regulator will look at a case you have not raised with the operator first.

After that the two paths diverge completely. SportyBet holds Ghanaian licences in both categories, so a complaint about either sports betting or casino play concerns licensed activity and the Commission is the escalation route. It accepts complaints by email, by post and in person at its premises in Accra. We should add that SportyBet itself does not make this easy to discover: we found no published complaints procedure on its site and no page naming the Commission as a route. The licensing line in the footer is the only reference to the regulator anywhere we looked.

With Betum there is no Ghanaian escalation route to describe, because there is no Ghanaian licence for the Commission to act on. Betum’s own terms route all communication through a support form on its website, ask you to raise settlement disputes within three days, escalate unresolved cases to its own management, and then offer arbitration without naming an independent provider. Neither operator publishes an alternative dispute resolution service for Ghanaian players, which is standard for this market and worth stating plainly. Chargebacks through mobile money are not a realistic route with either.

Payments and withdrawals

This is the category we weight most heavily when we do score an operator, at 2.5 out of 11.5, because in Ghana it decides whether a casino is usable at all. We have measured no payout at either brand, so everything below is read from the operators’ own published pages rather than from a transaction.

One line in that table deserves more than a row. Betum publishes a Ghana landing page whose page description promises mobile money by name, and the same page tells you mobile wallets are the method Ghanaians prefer. Its own payment methods section lists cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, bank transfer and four cryptocurrencies, and no mobile money at all. We could not reach a funded cashier to see which is true. Until somebody does, treat the promise as a marketing claim rather than a payment method.

Where we do publish withdrawal times, they come from transactions we requested and received ourselves, and those are collected on our page covering the casinos we have timed ourselves.

Bonuses

SportyBet. We are not going to tell you what SportyBet’s welcome bonus is, because we could not read it on the operator’s own pages. Its promotions page carries running offers including cashback, daily spins and accumulator features, and a separate marketing page advertises a return on a first deposit without publishing the terms. Third-party sites state a 150% match up to 500 cedis and a free bet on registration with total confidence. We could not confirm the match percentage, the maximum, whether it is credited as cash or as a free bet, whether it is restricted to the app, the wagering requirement, the minimum odds or the expiry, from anything SportyBet publishes where a prospective customer can read it. If you are choosing on the strength of a welcome offer, read the terms inside your own account before depositing.

Betum. The bonus itself is legible, which is to its credit: 100% on the first deposit, with the wagering requirement displayed as thirty times on the same screen as the offer. That is more than SportyBet shows a logged-out visitor. What is not legible is who it is for. On the screen we captured, the qualifying deposit was stated as 100 Mexican pesos, on a bonus panel that lists cedis as an available currency. A welcome offer that expresses its entry price in a currency from another continent is a reasonable clue about which market the product was built for and which market the landing page was built for.

Neither figure on this page came from a funded account, and we have not tested whether either bonus behaves as described.

Sportsbook, casino and what each lobby actually contains

These are different products aimed at different habits. SportyBet leads with fixtures and odds and treats games as a section you navigate to. Betum leads with a jackpot banner and a grid of slots, and its sportsbook sits underneath.

SportyBet’s Games lobby is reachable from the main navigation and carries categories including Slots, Live Casino, Crash, Table, Card Games, Wheel, Dice, Numbers, Lottery, Virtuals and Multiplayer. What it does not carry is a single third-party provider name on the screens we examined. The titles shown are the operator’s own, and the app listing describes the casino as in-house. Betum’s lobby does the opposite and names its suppliers on the tiles, with Pragmatic Play, PG Soft, Thunderkick and Evolution visible on the homepage.

We are not going to turn that into a quality judgement, because we did not play at either. It is a real structural difference and you can weigh it yourself: one operator builds its own games and does not tell you who audits them on the page, the other integrates studios you can look up independently. Neither of those facts tells you anything about whether you will be paid.

On sports, SportyBet displays live counts by sport in its live betting sidebar rather than a single headline number, so we have no total to quote and are not going to estimate one. Betum lists a broad sportsbook by category. We have compared no odds and settled no bets at either brand.

Customer support: what happened when we tried

We opened SportyBet’s live chat as a logged-out visitor. The assistant offered to connect us to a representative, we accepted, and the next thing the widget produced was a login form asking for a mobile number and a password. We had neither, and the conversation ended there.

We want to be fair about what that shows. Requiring authentication before an agent discusses an account is sensible, and most of SportyBet’s chat traffic will be existing customers with account problems. But it also means a prospective customer with a question about licensing, limits or bonus terms cannot ask a human anything at all. The published alternatives are a phone number and a support email address in the footer, both Ghana-specific, and no WhatsApp or social channel that we could see.

We did not contact Betum’s support, so we have no comparable test to report and will not invent one. What its site publishes is an email contact and a support form, with self-exclusion also handled by email. There is no published phone number for Ghana and no Ghanaian responsible gambling contact that we found.

Tax on your winnings

Good news, and it applies identically to both. Ghana introduced a 10% withholding tax on gambling winnings in 2023 and repealed it in April 2025 under the Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2025, Act 1129, which took effect on 2 April 2025. Winnings from a licensed operator are not taxed at source. The 20% tax on operator gross gaming revenue was not repealed, so the industry still pays, but that does not come out of your payout. Any review published before mid-2025 telling you to expect a 10% deduction is out of date, and so is any page still repeating it now.

One qualification, because it is the sort of thing that matters here. We could find no published position from the Ghana Revenue Authority, from the statute or from either budget statement on how winnings from an operator that is not licensed in Ghana are treated. There may be no difference at all. There is simply nothing published, and we would rather tell you that than assume.

Everything side by side

So which one

We are not going to hand you a winner on payout grounds, because we have funded neither account and a recommendation without a payout behind it is worth nothing. On everything else, this comparison is less balanced than most we publish, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest in the opposite direction.

Read that second column carefully, because it is not a consolation prize. Betum is more forthcoming about itself than SportyBet is, and a reader who judged these two brands on transparency alone would pick the wrong one. Disclosure is not protection. What Betum discloses is a Belize company operating under a licence from a body outside Ghana, terms that cap your monthly withdrawals in euro, give you three days to raise a dispute and place the whole contract under the law of Anjouan. All of that is clearly written down, and none of it gives a player in Accra anywhere to go.

If what you actually want is a casino we have funded ourselves, this is not that page. Those are ranked and scored on our tested casino list for Ghana, and each one states exactly how far our own withdrawal test got, from a timed payout with a reference number to a request we could not place at all.

Checking an operator yourself, in about a minute

• Scroll to the bottom of the operator’s site and read the footer. It should name a company, not just a brand, and give one or more licence numbers.
• Check which regulator is named. A licence from the Gaming Commission of Ghana is issued in the country you live in. A licence from anywhere else may be perfectly genuine and still leave you with no local route if something goes wrong.
• Open gamingcommission.gov.gh, go to Licensed Operators, and search the register for the trade name. Confirm the operation type matches what you want to play and that the expiry date has not passed.
• If the operator names an offshore register, go and search it. If the number in the footer does not return a matching entry, that is worth an email to the operator before you deposit rather than after.
• Read the withdrawal section of the terms before the bonus section. Minimum withdrawal, monthly caps, fees and the dispute deadline tell you more about an operator than any welcome offer does.
• Ignore licence numbers published by review sites, including ours. Read them off the operator’s own pages and check the category on the regulator’s register.
• Licensing is one check among several. The rest of what we look at before putting money into an account is set out in our guide to choosing a safe online casino.

The exact limits of what we verified

• The register we checked: the Commission’s licensed operators register, retrieved 20 August 2026, showing licences issued 1 January 2026 and expiring 31 December 2026, listing trade name, operation type, dates and location. Our copy contains 85 rows and the category counts add to exactly 85 with nothing unaccounted for.
• A gap we cannot close: an earlier retrieval of the same page reported 89 entries. A partial load on 10 September 2026 showed a footer count of 85, and in one instance 86. A few rows may sit outside what we hold. We think it is unlikely that one of them is a Betum entry, given that no Ghanaian company is named anywhere on the site, but we cannot rule it out and we are not going to pretend we can.
• How we reached it: Ghana restricts access to the Commission’s site from outside the country and our desk is not in Ghana. On 10 September 2026 the register returned a 503 error and could not be reloaded at all. It was reachable again later in the month, and on 27 September 2026 we searched it for both trade names: SportyBet still appears under Sports Betting and under Online Casino, and Betum still does not appear in any category. That search looked for two names rather than pulling the whole table, so it confirms where each brand sits and tells us nothing about the row count below. Reaching the register through assisted retrieval rather than in our own browser is weaker than reading it directly, and we would rather say so.
• What the register does not contain: no licence number column, no legal company name column, no address column. Any site quoting you a 2026 Ghanaian licence number did not get it from the regulator.
• The Anjouan check: we searched the register the footer points to and found no matching entry for the number, the company or the domain in the data we could see. That is a failed verification, not proof of absence.
• The Comoros sources: the gambling-specific finding comes from the 2024 GIABA mutual evaluation, published by the FATF. The Central Bank notice is a separate document: it concerns banking and financial institutions, names the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority and Anjouan Corporates Services, does not name Anjouan Licensing Services and does not address gambling licences. The link between those bodies is reported by ABC News rather than stated by a Comorian authority.
• What we could not test: deposits, withdrawals, payout speed, real bonus terms in a live account, whether Betum’s cashier offers mobile money, game counts, KYC turnaround, odds margins. Nothing here is a payout claim.
• Check it yourself: the Commission publishes the register at gamingcommission.gov.gh under Licensed Operators. If what you see differs from this page, trust the register, and please tell us.

Responsible gambling

Betting should stay fun. Gambling involves risk and should never be treated as a source of income, and you must be 18 or older to play at either operator. If gambling stops feeling like entertainment, use the deposit limits and self-exclusion tools your operator provides, or reach out for support through the Gaming Commission of Ghana’s problem gambling referral channels.

Frequently asked questions

Where this leaves things