ANJL says a Brazil ban on licensed online casino could push illegal market share from 41% to 82%

A technical study by Brazil’s National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL) says a proposed ban on online casinos for licensed betting companies could more than double the illegal market’s share, from 41% to 82%. For PSPs, acquiring teams, and banks active in Brazil, the number to watch is not the headline risk — it is the migration of volume back to unlicensed domains.

1. ANJL said the projected jump in illegal share is tied to the scale of the supply already in the market: from June to August this year, an average of 13.7 new clandestine websites were registered per day in Brazil. In one week of monitoring, between 11-18 September, the association identified 6,409 illegal betting domains accessible to users.
2. Plínio Lemos Jorge, president of ANJL, said the study shows that a ban would likely push millions of bettors toward illegal websites, the vast majority of which are hosted abroad and do not collect any taxes. He said 55.8% of the websites located outside the national scope use a distribution network that hides the original hosting, and 98.3% of the domains do not end in “.br”.
3. The association said the measure would also affect the more than 25 million bettors registered on legal platforms, who would be exposed to illegal sites. On ANJL’s estimate, banning casino betting in Brazil would cost the country between BRL3.6 billion ($700.9 million) and BRL7.4 billion in annual revenue.
4. Lemos Jorge argued that the current restrictions are meant to protect bettors and their money, but that those protections disappear on unlicensed sites. He specifically pointed to the absence of tools such as blocking beneficiaries of social programmes and self-exclusion mechanisms, which are standard controls in regulated environments and usually the first things to vanish when traffic moves offshore.

For high-risk payment providers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: when regulated access narrows, volume does not disappear — it tends to relocate to domains outside the tax net, often with weaker hosting transparency and no consumer-protection infrastructure.