More than 800 influencers are promoting suspicious illegal betting sites on Instagram, ANJL-backed LegitBet study finds

A monitoring system used by Brazil’s National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL) found 802 influencer profiles sharing links to suspicious betting sites on Instagram. For PSPs, the point is not the number alone: the same ecosystem that pushes traffic to unlicensed operators also creates the volume, repeat behaviour, and affiliate-link patterns that acquirers and compliance teams end up seeing downstream.

1. The LegitBet platform, run by ANJL to track clandestine betting, had monitored 48,318 profiles in total, with the latest consolidated data updated through Monday (2). The 802 identified profiles are the ones already flagged by the system, not the full universe on Instagram.
2. The monitoring runs in periodic rounds and, according to ANJL, the real scale can be much larger. In one round on 27 October, the system checked 908 profiles in 1h25 and found 626 promoting links to suspicious betting sites. In the same sweep, it found 500 new addresses, 396 of which showed an affiliate-link pattern.
3. Follower counts matter here because reach is the commodity. The study says 73% of the profiles have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. The rest were split as follows: 23.6% with 100,000 to 1 million followers, 2.9% with fewer than 10,000, and 0.5% with more than 1 million.
4. Nearly 74% of the 802 profiles posted repeatedly, meaning a fresh promotion of suspicious illegal betting links at least once every 3 days. The identified influencers posted links leading to 844 different sites, and the most-shared link appeared across 86 profiles.
5. ANJL president Lemos Jorge said the data are alarming because the 74% share of profiles with 10,000 to 100,000 followers implies a potential reach of 5.9 million to 59.4 million people. He also noted that Instagram allows accounts for teenagers from age 13, while these illegal sites do not prohibit underage access.

ANJL also said its efforts against this network were weakened by MP 1.394, issued in September by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which prohibited the legalized fixed-odds betting market. Earlier in September, the association had sent extrajudicial notices to Meta, Google, TikTok and X demanding responses on the removal of these profiles.