Federal government requests blocks on 13,241 illegal betting sites in Brazil

Brazil's federal government has requested the blocking of 13,241 illegal betting sites since the prohibition took effect, according to a media report. The figure was reported as the number of platforms targeted by the government.

Sílvia Piva, a lawyer and researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo (IEA-USP), said the blocking leaves open the question of how operations that continue outside supervision will be identified. She said this would require tracking how such operators reach the public and through which channels they receive money.

Piva said the difficulty is greater because betting operates in a digital environment for which no governance structure exists. Brazil can prohibit online betting, she said, but enforcement depends on other companies or institutions that may be outside the country. According to Piva, the provisional measure sets out responsibilities in Brazil, but its execution depends on cooperation between those agents and on the ability to reach different parts of the business.

The report said blocking does not guarantee that such platforms are excluded digitally, because technology helps digital platforms create new sites, addresses and domains, allowing users to gain access again. The same technology can help the state identify suspected online activity, it said. Piva said controlling access in the country does not mean eliminating the activity on the internet.

The report said that before the prohibition, enforcement was carried out by the federal government, which monitored betting, financial movements and the volume of operations in full through data supplied by institutions. It said the rules were expanded in the years after Law No. 13,756/2018 introduced fixed-odds betting in Brazil, and that from 2025 the market began operating under a more structured federal authorisation regime.