Lola Brasil criticizes Brazil’s betting ban and calls for stricter enforcement instead

The liberal women’s group Lola Brasil has pushed back against the government’s decision to ban bets in Brazil, arguing that licensed operators are being punished for the misconduct of unlicensed ones. For PSPs and high-risk operators, the important part is simple: the debate is shifting from outright prohibition to enforcement, licensing discipline, and the fate of regulated traffic versus the black market.

1. In a column published in Painel da Folha de S.Paulo, Sara Ganime of Lola Brasil argued that the state does not have legitimacy to decide for citizens and that individuals should bear responsibility for their own choices. That framing matters because it is being used to argue against a blanket ban on betting products, not against regulation itself.
2. Ganime said betting companies that regularised themselves after Brazil approved the sector’s legal framework met specific requirements before operating. According to her, they agreed to verify age, collect taxes, and join the government’s self-exclusion platform, which blocks all authorised sites at once and has already been used by more than half a million Brazilians.
3. The article says the public backlash is aimed not at betting per se, but at criminal operators exploiting compulsive players. As an example, it cites a group that promoted the “jogo do tigrinho” and was indicted by police; the text says that group moved R$ 130 million.
4. Lola Brasil’s counterproposal is stricter supervision rather than a ban: operators that break the rules should be fined, penalised, and can lose their operating licence. In practical terms, that is the usual high-risk market trade-off — keep the licensed channel open, but make the cost of non-compliance painful enough that it does not become just another business expense.
5. The group also argues that shutting betting platforms will not stop compulsive bettors. Its view is that they will move to clandestine platforms, where there is no regulatory protection and no self-exclusion mechanism.

For payment providers and acquirers, the signal here is that Brazil is still fighting over the shape of the market: prohibition on one side, licensed-channel enforcement on the other. That is usually where banking access, KYC controls, and merchant monitoring become the real policy battlefield.