Brazil betting regulation, not prohibition, is the point of a Tiago Gomes argument in JOTA.Info

Tiago Gomes, a gaming and betting lawyer at Souto Correa Advogados, says banning betting does not kill demand; it just hands the market to criminals and strips away the protections operators can actually build into a regulated setup. For PSPs and acquirers watching Brazil, the practical issue is simple: regulation is the difference between a market where KYC, self-exclusion and integrity controls exist, and one where they do not.

1. In a piece published on Saturday (15/8) in JOTA.Info, Gomes argues that Brazil has arrived late to a debate that is already settled in dozens of jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain and France. In those markets, he says, the question is no longer whether a regulated betting market should exist, but how well it is supervised.
2. He uses China as his main example of why prohibition does not work as a market-control strategy. According to the figures cited in his article, more than 100,000 people were arrested there for illegal betting in 2021. In 2024, about 4,500 platforms were taken down and 73,000 investigations were opened into cross-border operations.
3. The illegal betting market in China moves about 140 billion dollars a year, according to estimates Gomes cites from several studies. He notes that this is roughly ten times the size of the country’s legal state lotteries and close to half of the world’s illegal betting market. His conclusion is blunt: “this genie does not go back into the bottle.”
4. Gomes says regulation makes tools available that the underground market does not: identity verification to block minors, self-exclusion that can lock a player out across operators at the same time, a ban on betting on credit, and integrity monitoring aimed at detecting match manipulation. In other words, regulated operators have obligations; illegal ones have none.
5. He also points to Brazil’s estimated base of more than 20 million bettors. Even if the share of problem gamblers is small, the absolute number is still large, with spillovers into families, jobs and personal finances. He warns against the opposite mistake as well: a legal framework so restrictive that it ends up looking, in practice, like prohibition. The result, he says, is not less betting, but betting pushed back into the shadows.