Gustavo Pereira sold R$ 500,000 in bets, now sells coffee at a traffic light in Lages, SC to stay off gambling

A young man in Santa Catarina who says he lost more than R$ 500,000 to betting is now selling coffee and hot chocolate at a traffic light to keep his mind busy and avoid gambling. For PSPs and operators, the practical detail is obvious: the problem is not only access to bets, but the loop of deposits, credit, and constant re-entry.

1. Gustavo Pereira told g1 that his gambling started with sports betting in 2021, with small stakes of R$ 5, R$ 10, R$ 25, R$ 50, and at most R$ 100. In 2024, the habit expanded from sports betting into casinos, and he said he lost track of amounts and began owing money to a bank.
2. He said the total loss reached more than R$ 500,000. At that point, he said he had no one left to ask for money, no dignity left, and felt ashamed to go out or look people in the eye because many knew about his situation.
3. One of the measures that helped him stop was auto-exclusion. The other was more blunt: filling his day with work. He now has two other jobs, one in sales in the afternoon and another at night as a waiter, while also selling coffee and hot chocolate in the morning and part of the afternoon, Monday through Friday.
4. His day starts at 4 a.m., when he gets up to make the chocolate and coffee, and ends around midnight, when he finishes organizing the cups. He said that once he started keeping his mind occupied, he stopped thinking about gambling and no longer felt the urge.
5. Customers pay after taking the drink: they receive the cup and Gustavo’s PIX key, then settle later. He framed that setup as part of rebuilding trust after, in his words, previously deceiving people and losing their money. A video showing part of his routine had 36,200 views on a social network by 9 p.m. on Tuesday (25).

For high-risk operators, the useful read here is not the viral angle. It is the mechanism: repeated betting, expansion from sports into casino products, debt, shame, and then a stopgap made up of auto-exclusion plus frictionless access to other activities and income. That is the part compliance teams keep seeing, even when the local story is a coffee cart at a traffic light.