ANJL challenges Brazil’s shutdown of regulated betting sites as block takes effect on October 6

Brazil’s National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL) has questioned how the block on licensed betting houses was carried out, arguing that the rule does not clearly require operators to use their own domains, servers, and systems to execute it. For regulated PSPs and betting operators, the point is simple: when the mechanics are vague, the compliance burden gets pushed into the gap between law, infrastructure, and platform operations.

1. ANJL said the shutdown of authorized operators, effective from Tuesday, October 6, was implemented under Provisional Measure No. 1.394/2026, which banned betting activity on September 25 and set a deadline that expired this week.
2. The association, which represents part of Brazil’s regulated sector, argued that closing licensed companies leaves bettors with fewer supervised options and creates room for the clandestine market to grow. That is the real commercial problem for the regulated side: when licensed channels disappear, demand does not disappear with them.
3. ANJL’s complaint is about execution, not just the ban itself. The text, according to the group, allows blocking or redirection of electronic addresses but does not specify how that should be done, or whether companies must make their technology stack available for the task. ANJL president Plínio Lemos Jorge said there is no clear legal basis to require operators to use their domains, servers, systems, cloud services, DNS, and other technology assets to carry out the measure.
4. The association also questioned the removal of company channels on social networks and raised open issues around who would bear implementation costs and risks, what the data protection consequences could be, and what it means for private-company audiences to be redirected to a Federal Government institutional channel during an election period.
5. The timeline was compressed. On September 26 and 27, LegitBet, ANJL’s monitoring system, detected a wave of new suspicious sites. On October 4, the first round of elections took place. At 23:59 on October 5, regulated platforms stopped operating. On October 6, the block and redirection of electronic addresses was implemented.

In practice, different brands handled the cutoff differently. Sites such as Sportingbet, Betnacional, Esportes da Sorte, and Superbet redirected users to the official “Brasil sin Bets” page, while Betano and KTO informed users that their activities had been suspended. That split tells you the execution procedure was not spelled out in the rule, which is exactly the ambiguity ANJL is trying to pin down.