Why gamblers prefer licensed casinos? The main reason is that it is understood that the licensed casino cannot afford to scam players because the news would spread instantly and destroy their business (the license authority also). Also it is believed that licensed casino play a role in vetting the casino, take a look at their payment history record and filtering out the bad actors before issuing them the license.
Also some operate with licenses from jurisdictions that are more flexible with privacy (like Curacao) and licenses from those are relatively easy to get and therefore most casinos are licensed from Curacao.
Once I also thought that if casino has a license it is a guarantee of not being scammed. Then someone posted in gambling forum section numbers and it turned out that it aint that costly. I have searches in google and found
following. Site shows different info and prices, but in general, its cost less than 50k EUR to have a fully licenses casino. This is not the most correct page, but prices more or less are the same (according to google search).
Attract 500 customers that will deposit 100 bucks (which isnt that hard and and most can afford imho) and you have licenses paid off. And you are free to do with casino whatever you want.
It’s not 100% guaranteed that they will not scam but you will lessen the chance if being scam since they are registered under a company that has details of their operations legal information.
While anonymous casino that doesn’t have license can exit scam out of thin air without any track or way to file a complaint against them.
So licenses casino is always preferred by players that wants to have some sense of safety instead of relying to trust basis. We are already done on that era, Even Bitcoin is now being regulated through exchange.