Romeu Zema’s online betting ban pitch in Brazil rests on numbers that do not add up

Romeu Zema said in São Paulo on Tuesday (18/8) that his first act as president would be to ban all online betting houses in Brazil. The problem is the statistical backbone of that pitch is off by a mile: the figures he cited for gambling addiction and suicide attempts are not supported by official or scientific sources.

1. Zema, the Novo candidate, made the statement at a meeting in São Paulo with women whose families had been harmed by online gambling. To justify the proposal, he claimed there were “180,000 suicide attempts” tied to bets and “almost 10 million people vulnerable to addiction” in Brazil, without citing a source for either figure.
2. BNLData checked those claims using information obtained via Brazil’s Access to Information Law (LAI). The official count puts Brazil at 30.9 million bettors. Even using the highest prevalence rate recognized in the international literature, the result is nowhere near Zema’s number.
3. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates gambling disorder affects between 1.2% and 1.4% of adults exposed. A meta-analysis published in The Lancet Public Health set the rate at 1.41%. Applied to Brazil’s 30.9 million bettors, that implies roughly 435,000 people with problematic gambling behavior, not 10 million.
4. That gap is not a rounding error. Zema’s figure is more than 20 times the WHO-based estimate. For it to be true, Brazil would need a gambling addiction rate 23 times the global average, meaning 1 in every 3 bettors (32.4%) would have a gambling disorder. The source notes that this would have no parallel among studied addictive substances or behaviors, not even alcohol.
5. The suicide claim runs into the same wall: no source, and no fit with Brazil’s official health systems. The Mortality Information System (SIM) recorded 16,462 completed suicides in 2022/2023, compared with 10,533 in 2013. The Notifiable Health Conditions Information System (SINAN) recorded between 120,000 and 40,000 to 50,000 suicide attempts in the same comparison periods. Over five years, from 2018 to 2022, SINAN accumulated 556,152 reports of self-inflicted injuries.

For high-risk PSPs, the useful part here is not the campaign noise. It is the mechanics: Brazil has 30.9 million bettors, official health data exists, and claims about gambling-related harm can be checked against it. If a political proposal is built on inflated numbers, the regulatory conversation around online betting may move faster than the evidence does.