Brazil’s online betting regulation is expanding the fight against organized crime

Brazil’s regulated online betting market is now doing more than collecting tax and formalizing operators. According to specialists and financial control officials, it is also creating a cleaner data trail for AML (anti-money laundering) monitoring, suspicious-activity reporting, and law-enforcement follow-up — which is exactly the part PSPs and acquirers care about when they look at a high-risk market.

1. The issue was central at BiS Brasília (Brazilian iGaming Summit Brasília), held on 2 and 3 June, where industry representatives, regulators, public authorities, and specialists discussed how Brazil’s regulated market is settling in. The backdrop matters: this is not a theoretical policy debate anymore, but an operating framework that directly changes how payments and player monitoring work.
2. Ricardo Saadi, president of the Conselho de Controle de Atividades Financeiras (Coaf), said public-private cooperation is essential to protect market integrity. “All of us want an honest sector, free from infiltration by organized crime,” he said. He also made Coaf’s operating logic plain: the agency depends on the quality of reports received from obligated entities. “Coaf works based on the communications it receives from obligated sectors. If the communication is not of quality, the analysis will not be either,” Saadi noted.
3. In practice, that is the big difference between the regulated market and the illegal one. Authorized operators must identify users, monitor financial movements, implement compliance controls, and report suspicious activity to the authorities. Those suspicious transaction reports are then analyzed and, when needed, shared with investigative bodies such as the Polícia Federal and the Ministério Público.
4. The regulatory regime has been tightening since January 2025, when only companies authorized by the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), under the Ministry of Finance, were allowed to offer fixed-odds betting legally in Brazil. The framework also introduced requirements around AML, responsible gambling, and operational security — the standard list, but in high-risk payments those standards are not decorative.
5. Regulation is also giving the market a more detailed view of player behavior. At BiS Brasília, Legitimuz iGaming account manager Pedro Brisola presented data based on more than 27 million unique CPFs and more than 4.4 billion verifications processed. In the socioeconomic breakdown, class D accounted for about 53% of registered users, making it the largest segment in the sample.

For PSPs, the operational takeaway is straightforward: Brazil’s licensed betting market is becoming more reportable, more monitorable, and less hospitable to opaque flows. That does not eliminate risk, but it does change the compliance conversation from “can we see anything?” to “how well are operators documenting what they see?”