A potential Brazilian government ban on online casinos operated by legalized betting companies could increase illegal operators’ share of the market from 41% to 82%, according to a study by the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL).
The projection comes as thousands of unauthorized betting websites remain accessible in Brazil. During a one-week monitoring period from September 11 to 18, ANJL’s technical team identified 6,409 illegal betting domains that were responding normally and were fully accessible.
The association estimates that a ban could also cost Brazil between R$ 3.6 billion ($700 million) and R$ 7.4 billion ($1.44 billion) in annual revenue. More than 25 million bettors are registered with legal platforms, and ANJL said restricting online casino operations on those platforms could redirect users toward unauthorized sites.
“In other words, Brazil loses in every sense. We will have millions of people who will not stop gambling. They will simply start accessing these sites, which do not collect a single tax,” said the president of ANJL, Plínio Lemos Jorge.
“The most vulnerable social strata, which are precisely those that the federal government wants to protect, become even more unprotected. After all, these platforms do not offer any mechanism to protect financial and mental health, such as blocking beneficiaries of social programs or self-exclusion tools.”
ANJL’s study also recorded continued growth in the number of unauthorized gambling websites. Between June and August this year, an average of 13.7 new clandestine websites were registered per day in Brazil without authorization from the Ministry of Finance.
According to Plínio Lemos Jorge, most illegal sites are hosted outside Brazil and do not collect taxes in the country. The association’s technical analysis also examined how offshore domains are structured and hosted.
“Our study showed that of the websites located outside the national scope, 55,8% use a distribution network that hides the original hosting and 98,3% of the domains are not ending in ‘.br’. In other words, everything that is currently prohibited will become widely accessible to ensure the well-being and protection of bettors and their money,” Plínio highlighted.