Illegal Betting Market Has 355 Domains for Every Authorized Platform in Brazil

Brazil’s regulated betting market now sits next to a much larger shadow market: since regulation began, there have been at least 355 illegal betting domains for every authorized domain in the country. For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, the issue is not just volume; it is the persistence of blocked sites, leakage in enforcement, and the fact that the illegal side keeps replenishing itself.

1. The federal government has blocked 66,482 unauthorized betting domains between January 2025 and this month, according to a new survey by the Associação Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL), which represents regulated operators. The same study says about 11,8 mil of those blocked addresses may still be accessible, or 17,7% of the total.
2. ANJL says Brazil has 187 domains belonging to authorized companies under the Ministry of Finance, compared with the illegal domain count that gives the market its 355-to-1 ratio. In practice, that is a rough map of how much of the betting flow sits outside the regulated perimeter.
3. The association says these unauthorized sites operate without public oversight and without paying the taxes required in the regulated sector. They also rely on aggressive advertising to attract bettors, especially vulnerable groups such as children and teenagers.
4. ANJL president Plínio Lemos Jorge said tighter measures on the sector could expand the illegal market further. He argued that illegal sites will not disappear because of a provisional measure and that technical assessments should guide policy decisions.
5. In ANJL’s simulated scenarios, if online casinos were banned, the share of the unauthorized market would rise from about 41% to between 78% and 82% of bets. In that case, between R$ 8,2 billion and R$ 19,1 billion per year could move to illegal operators, while tax losses would range from R$ 3,6 billion to R$ 7,4 billion per year, on top of the R$ 7,2 billion to R$ 10,8 billion that the study says the unauthorized market is already not paying.

The compliance angle matters here because the regulated market is not just about licensing; it is also about hard controls. ANJL says 3 million beneficiaries of Bolsa Família and the Benefício de Prestação Continuada (BPC) are blocked from betting, and more than 1,2 million self-exclusion requests have already been recorded. None of those protections are mandatory on the illegal side, which is exactly why blocked domains keep coming back under new names.