Bets Go Offline in Brazil With R$ 1.33 Billion Still in Players’ Accounts

The voluntary withdrawal window for fixed-odds betting balances ended at 23:59 on Monday (5), and from 0:00 on Tuesday (6) the websites and apps of operators authorized by Brazil’s Ministry of Finance were supposed to be offline. For PSPs, the key point is less the shutdown itself than the unwind: R$ 1.33 billion is still sitting in 26.5 million CPFs, and the refunds now move through the payment rails, with banks first and Caixa as the backstop.

1. The shutdown follows Medida Provisória nº 1.394/2026, signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on September 25, 11 days before the first round of elections. The regulated market had been operating since January 1, 2025.
2. According to the latest Ministry of Finance update published on Monday, players had withdrawn R$ 775.6 million in the ten days between the MP’s publication and Monday (5), which the ministry said was about 37% of the balance that had been on the platforms. Dario Durigan, the Finance Minister, said the accounts held R$ 2.1 billion on September 25; on Friday (2) he said R$ 652 million had already been withdrawn and R$ 1.4 billion remained; by Monday (5), the balance had fallen to R$ 1.33 billion.
3. The official figures shifted over the period. The first estimate from the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA) put the amount to be returned at R$ 1.7 billion across 22.9 million bettors. Days later, the minister started using R$ 2.1 billion as the starting balance, and the final tally shows 26.5 million bettors with positive balances.
4. Most of the money is not sitting in large balances. About 92% of the accounts with positive balances hold less than R$ 10, and more than 96% hold less than R$ 25, according to the ministry. The concentration is brutal: 1% of accounts holds 80% of the balance, or about R$ 1.06 billion. Another 3.4% of accounts hold 90%, and 8.3% hold 96% of the funds. These are account counts, not unique people, since one CPF can be registered with more than one operator.
5. Durigan also said 48 accounts with balances above R$ 500,000 are being monitored by the Finance Ministry together with the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. He added that authorized operators were moving about R$ 600 million per day before the shutdown.

For payment providers, the operational question now is straightforward: refund flows have shifted from the operators’ own front ends to the banks processing those payments, and if that does not resolve everything, Caixa sits at the end of the line. That is the part that matters when a betting market is turned off by decree instead of by attrition.