TJRJ betting lawsuits rose 1,087% as Brazil’s regulated market opened, while the R$ 62.5 billion figure does not refer to licensed bets

Agência Brasil reported that betting-related cases at the TJRJ jumped from 58 to 689 in two years, and that number has been recycled as proof of sector damage. In practice, it mostly shows that regulation gave bettors a local company to sue — and that matters for PSPs and operators because access to courts is part of the risk map.

1. The TJRJ recorded 58 betting cases in 2024, 439 in 2025, and more than 689 between January and September this year, which is where the reported 1,087% increase comes from. The cases involve paid-but-uncredited bets, odds changes, account and withdrawal blocks, and clauses considered abusive.
2. That rise tracks the regulated market, not just consumer harm. Brazil’s regulated market only started operating in 2025, and since January 2025 operating without a portaria has been illegal. Before that, bettors did not have a Brazilian company with a CNPJ to take to court, so the increase also reflects access to justice created by regulation.
3. The companies leading the list are Betano, Bet365, and 7K Bet, with bettors claiming more than R$ 20 million in total against them. These are licensed, large-scale operators. Ana Gaming said the volume of lawsuits reflects the size of the operation and its active user base, not the merits of the cases.
4. The headline-grabbing R$ 62.5 billion figure comes from the third edition of the Boletim Fiscal dos Estados Brasileiros, prepared by Comsefaz with Centro Celso Furtado and based on Pix flows, not operator data. The report was published in August. According to Fazenda data cited in the same study, licensed bets generated R$ 36.9 billion in 2025, or R$ 25.6 billion less than the Comsefaz estimate.
5. The gap is not a mystery if you look at the market split. The difference is about 41% of the estimate, and a LCA study projected that clandestine betting accounted for 41% to 51% of the market. When the Comsefaz study was released, ANJL pointed to “graves errors” and challenged the claim that families had lost R$ 62.5 billion because of legal betting.

For high-risk payment providers, the practical takeaway is blunt: a market that is regulated, litigated, and still partially underground creates two different exposure profiles. In the legal lane, operators can be sued. In the illegal lane, the bettor often has no one in the TJRJ to sue at all. That is what makes the 689 actions less like a simple scandal metric and more like evidence that regulation created a dispute-resolution path before prohibition started closing it.