Brazil’s online gambling ban has already triggered over 3,500 layoffs

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Provisional Measure 1.394, which prohibits fixed-odds betting throughout Brazil, has already pushed the local gambling stack into a mess of layoffs, collective leave, and shut-down operations. For PSPs, affiliates, and payment-adjacent vendors, the immediate takeaway is simple: when the legal market gets squeezed, the operational blast radius reaches far beyond operators.

1. According to the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL), more than 3,500 workers have already been laid off since the measure took effect. ANJL’s survey, based on partial data collected by BNLData, says 23% of the sector’s workforce has been dismissed and another 28% — about 4,000 employees — has been placed on collective leave.
2. Taken together, that means 51% of the workforce has either lost jobs or been sent on collective leave in less than two weeks. ANJL says this comes to more than 7,600 workers. The association also warned that if the Supreme Federal Court (STF) takes too long to rule on the injunction request to suspend the ban, some of those workers could still end up formally dismissed.
3. ANJL estimates job cuts could reach 5,600 within 90 days. That matters because, in this market, “the gambling industry” is not just operators taking bets. Lemos Jorge, ANJL’s president, said it includes payment processors, marketing and compliance firms, agencies, affiliates, and specialized media outlets — all of which have started feeling the effects of the Provisional Measure.
4. The affiliate side has already been hit hard. Isabella Koon, chief commercial officer at Full Company, told NEXT.io that only three of the 13 affiliates she works with directly have kept their full teams. The other 10 have laid off all staff. Before the cuts, those affiliates were generating average monthly deposits of BRL 3 million to BRL 5 million, about $600,000 to $1 million, for betting operators.
5. The ban is also feeding the illegal market. According to BandTV, active illegal links rose from nearly 9,000 the day after the ban came into force to more than 40,000. The government says it had blocked over 13,000 illegal platforms by October 6. The Brazilian Institute of Responsible Gaming (IBJR) estimates that about 60% of the gambling market, valued at BRL 40 billion, or about $8 billion, annually, still runs through illegal websites.

For payment providers, the useful read here is not just “Brazil banned online gambling.” It is that a legal-market disruption of this size quickly spills into processors, affiliates, compliance vendors, and media inventory — while the illegal channel appears to scale into the gap just as fast.