Brazil's Casa Civil to coordinate betting oversight committee after ban

Brazil's Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA-MF) will join the Interinstitutional Committee for Oversight of the Exploitation and Advertising of Illegal Fixed-Odds Betting, which is coordinated by the Casa Civil, citing Metrópoles. The committee already includes representatives of the Communications Secretariat, the Attorney General's Office, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the Ministry of Sport, the Central Bank, the Financial Activities Control Council (COAF), the Federal Police, Anatel and the National Data Protection Agency (ANPD).

The change follows a provisional measure signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in September that prohibited online sports betting houses, known as bets, from operating in Brazil. The SPA-MF was created in 2024 and is responsible for regulating the sector.

The Ministry of Finance set out the committee's responsibilities. According to the ministry, the committee is to maintain a unified register of domains, applications and bank or payment accounts, define protocols for blocking sites and applications, interrupting financial flows and removing advertising and sponsorship, standardise notifications to providers, banks, payment institutions and advertising platforms, and refer reports of administrative, tax or criminal infractions to the authorities.

The Planalto Palace justified the ban on bets as a public health matter, a means of discouraging harmful practices and of combating household indebtedness. The market had been authorised in 2018, during the government of Michel Temer, but was only regulated from December 2023. Until then, the sector operated legally without clear rules, which the source says allowed access by minors and by beneficiaries of social programmes.

With regulation, the SPA introduced restrictions aimed at consumer protection: mandatory identity verification by platforms to prevent access by minors; a ban on betting by beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, the Benefício de Prestação Continuada (BPC) and other social programmes; a voluntary self-exclusion system; a prohibition on the use of credit cards, with bets to be made using available balance; and advertising restrictions under which adverts may not target children or promise easy gains and must state that betting is not an investment.

A study by the Institute for Health Policy Studies (IEPS) estimates that health harms associated with betting and gambling may cost the country approximately R$30.6bn a year. Of that total, R$17bn relates to deaths by suicide and R$13.4bn to depression; of the latter, R$10.4bn corresponds to loss of quality of life and R$3bn to medical treatment. The same study states that in 2025 about 1% of federal revenue from the sector was allocated to health. Under the regulation, platforms must pass 12% of gross gaming revenue (GGR) to the government, distributed among health, education, sport and other public policies.

The source states that the figures require caution. In a technical note at the foot of the chart supporting the figure, the authors of the IEPS dossier acknowledge that, given the limited evidence, it is not possible to state that such harms were caused directly by problem gambling; the suicides and cases of depression counted are associated with betting, not proven to be caused by it. The calculation also does not start from Brazilian cases: costs per bettor profile were imported from a 2023 study by the UK government (OHID), converted to reais by purchasing power parity and applied to the proportion of Brazilians at risk measured by LENAD III, a survey on drug consumption rather than betting. Of the R$13.4bn attributed to depression, R$10.4bn corresponds to a statistical estimate of loss of quality of life (QALY), not to actual spending; the only real outlay is the R$3bn in treatments. BNLData's FactCheck describes this as a three-layer extrapolation that is legitimate as a technical exercise but cannot be presented as a measured cost of bets to the country. The study figure that withstands checking, according to the source, is that only 1% of the sector's revenue is earmarked for health.

The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) said Brazil had built one of the world's most robust regulations but warned that the ban does not eliminate demand for gambling. In a document cited by the source, the association said the regime incorporated consumer protection and anti-money-laundering requirements, integrity provisions among the most modern in the world and measures against illegal operators, but that fiscal and political instability made it difficult to eliminate the illegal offshore market; it noted that the tax on GGR rose in less than a year, that a revocation bill was presented in July 2026 and that the ban ultimately closed the market.