World Cup puts Brazil’s bets crackdown under the spotlight as federal police target 87 companies

The World Cup has given Brazil’s gambling regulators and politicians a convenient stage: official enforcement against illegal betting is real, but so is the election-season noise around it. For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, the important part is the scale of the unlicensed market and the government’s own admission that monitoring is still thin.

1. According to a VEJA report, four in every ten Brazilians placed bets during the tournament, based on data from fintech Klavi and the country’s 187 licensed betting operators. In the first three rounds alone, R$ 780 million was deposited on match results, scores, and the number of yellow cards. In the Brazil vs Morocco match, the average spend per bettor reached R$ 524.
2. On Monday (6/7), the Federal Police launched an operation against 87 companies used by clandestine betting sites for money laundering and remitting funds abroad. The action followed tracing by the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA), under the Ministry of Finance, which identified more than a dozen unauthorised platforms.
3. The government’s own mapping identified 300 operators and about 40 institutions with possible links to criminal organisations. The Ministry of Finance then built a data-matching system that enabled the Council for Financial Activities Control (Coaf) to issue more than 20,000 alerts in two months about illegal betting activity. In parallel, the Federal Revenue Service asked for bank account freezes and Anatel took down pages linked to clandestine gambling.
4. The structural problem is capacity. The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) said that, in mid-2025, only three SPA employees were responsible for monitoring all betting transactions, identifying suspicious operations, and cataloguing irregularities. The SPA opened 455 cases against illegal platforms between 2024 and mid-2025, but the TCU still described the effort as insufficient.
5. In an audit seen by VEJA, the TCU estimated that 41% to 51% of the market remains in the hands of unauthorised operators, moving between R$ 26 billion and R$ 40 billion per year. The same document said the 21,842 domain blocks and 483 bank-account closures carried out so far “evidence ineffectiveness that reduces the perception of risk by criminals,” and recommended a bigger enforcement budget and tougher penalties.

For high-risk payment firms, the message is straightforward: Brazil is not short on enforcement headlines, but it is still working through a large unauthorised market, limited supervisory capacity, and a growing toolset for tracing funds, blocking accounts, and taking sites offline.