Fact-Checking Policy
The problem this policy solves
Casino facts decay faster than almost any subject a publication can cover. Bonus terms change overnight, licences lapse or get suspended, payout processors are swapped without announcement, and marketing pages routinely describe a product that differs from the one behind the login. A fact-checking policy for this niche cannot just ask “was this true when we heard it”; it has to ask “against which primary source did we verify it, and when”. This page describes exactly that discipline as practised at ONLINE CASINO DOCTOR.
The hierarchy of sources
Every checkable claim in our content is verified against the most authoritative source available, in this order:
- Regulator registers. Licence status is confirmed directly on the issuing authority’s public register, never inferred from the badge in an operator’s footer. Footer badges are marketing; registers are the record. Where a register and a footer disagree, the register wins and the discrepancy itself becomes a finding.
- Operator terms and conditions. Bonus figures, wagering requirements, game weightings, withdrawal limits, and fees are checked against the operator’s current published terms, and we archive a dated copy of the terms we relied on, so that when terms shift later we can prove what they said at the time.
- Our own testing. Claims about payout speed, verification friction, and support quality are grounded in documented test sessions with our own deposits, per our Editorial Standards. First-hand records beat second-hand claims.
- Primary documents and official statements. For news, that means regulator announcements, court filings, exchange disclosures, and named on-the-record statements.
- Reputable secondary reporting. Used with attribution when primary sources are not yet available, and clearly framed as such.
What never counts as verification: another affiliate site, an operator’s marketing page for a claim its own terms contradict, forum rumour, or a press release standing alone.
Claims that get special treatment
Payout and RTP claims
Operators advertise payout percentages and speeds because those numbers sell. We treat every such number as unverified marketing until it is anchored: return-to-player figures against the game studio’s published data or independent testing-lab certificates where available, and payout speed against our own withdrawal tests. Where a claim cannot be anchored, we either omit it or publish it explicitly attributed as the operator’s claim, never in our own voice.
Bonus mathematics
Every bonus we describe is recomputed by us from the operator’s terms: the wagering requirement applied to the correct base, the game weighting, the cap, the clock. Operator summaries of their own bonuses are frequently rosier than their own terms; the terms govern, and where the gap is large enough to mislead, the gap itself is reported.
Safety and legality statements
Anything we publish about age limits, jurisdiction legality, or help resources is checked against official sources, and these pages are re-reviewed on a schedule rather than only on complaint, because an outdated helpline number is the most harmful error this site could publish.
Process, dates, and re-verification
Fact-checking happens before publication, performed against the sources above, with a second pair of eyes on high-impact claims wherever our team size allows. Because facts here rot, reviews carry the date they were last verified, and material claims are re-checked when a review is updated, when an operator announces relevant changes, or when a reader challenges them, whichever comes first. A review that has not been re-verified for an extended period is treated internally as stale and queued for retest rather than defended as gospel.
When we cannot verify
Unverifiable claims are either cut, or published with their uncertainty stated in plain sight: who claims it, what would confirm it, and what we could not obtain. We consider a visible “we could not confirm this” more honest than a confident sentence resting on nothing, and this niche has enough confident nothing already.
Challenges
Anyone, reader or operator, can dispute a published fact by writing to support@onlinecasinodoctor.com with the claim and their evidence. Disputes are handled under our Corrections Policy: evidence is weighed against our archived sources, the outcome is implemented visibly, and the challenger gets an answer with reasons. An operator showing us a regulator document wins a correction in hours; an operator objecting to an unflattering but accurate finding wins a polite restatement of this policy.
