Eleanor Whitfield

Senior Fact-Checker

Eleanor Whitfield is the Senior Fact-Checker at Atelier Lodge. Every page on this site that carries a "Fact-checked by Eleanor Whitfield" credit has had each numerical claim, bonus term, licensing detail, and regulatory statement independently verified by her before publication. She is the last line of defence between a draft review and the version a reader sees.

Eleanor read Law at the University of Manchester and trained as a research analyst at a London-based regulatory consultancy, where she spent four years auditing compliance documentation for UK financial services firms. She moved into editorial fact-checking in 2020, working first at a national consumer-finance publication before joining Atelier Lodge in 2024 to build out a dedicated verification function.

Her remit at Atelier Lodge covers three areas. First, casino licensing — confirming that every operator we list holds the licence we say it holds, with the regulator we say issued it. Second, bonus terms — opening the operator's terms and conditions afresh for each review and confirming wagering, contribution weightings, expiry, and maximum bet rules match what our analysts have written. Third, statutory and regulatory claims — anything we say about UKGC policy, HMRC tax treatment of winnings, or self-exclusion schemes such as GamStop is verified against primary sources before going live.

Areas of expertise: Editorial fact-checking, UKGC and offshore licensing verification, regulatory documentation review, bonus terms and conditions analysis, primary-source citation.

Pages fact-checked: The homepage Best Bitcoin Casinos UK shortlist, all detailed casino reviews authored by James Blackwell, and the regulatory guides at /guides/.

How Verification Works at Atelier Lodge

Once a draft has been written by an analyst, it lands in Eleanor's queue. The standard checklist runs through the page line by line:

• Licence: the operator's stated regulator and licence number are checked against the regulator's public register.
• Bonus offer: the headline figure (percentage match, free spin count, maximum amount) is checked against the live promotion on the operator's site at the time of review.
• Wagering and weighting: the wagering multiplier, game contribution weightings, expiry, and maximum bet caps are taken directly from the operator's terms and conditions, archived, and matched to the draft.
• Payout claim: any specific payout time or percentage cited in the review is cross-checked against the analyst's recorded test data.
• External claim: statements about UK law, tax treatment, or third-party support services are cross-checked against the source organisation (HMRC, the UKGC, BeGambleAware, GamCare).

Where a claim cannot be verified to source, it is either pulled from the page or rewritten with the appropriate qualifier. Pages do not publish until every box on the checklist has been ticked.

Why a Dedicated Fact-Checker?

The casino comparison space is saturated with sites that publish fast and verify nothing. Wagering requirements quietly change; bonus caps get tightened; licences expire and are not renewed. Without a dedicated verification step, a review that was accurate on the day it was written quietly drifts out of date and starts to mislead the reader who lands on it six months later.

Atelier Lodge runs verification as a distinct role from the analyst who tested the casino. It is slower, but it means that when a page tells you a casino's bonus is 100% up to 1 BTC with a 35x wagering requirement, that statement was checked by someone who is not the same person who is incentivised to make the casino sound good.