Willer Tomaz moved R$ 6.6 billion through bets in 18 months, Brazilian Apostas Secretariat says

Brazil’s Secretariat of Prizes and Betting says lawyer Willer Tomaz handled betting flows at Blaze on a scale that should have triggered stronger controls. For PSPs, the point is simple: when one customer is moving billions of reais, transaction monitoring, source-of-funds checks, and risk scoring are not decorative.

1. According to data provided by Blaze to the Secretariat, Tomaz deposited more than R$ 258 million and withdrew R$ 200 million over the year. In a court case Tomaz filed against the betting operator, his defense said that, including 2026, the total deposits reached R$ 325 million.
2. The Secretariat’s analysis says Blaze showed weaknesses in anti-money-laundering controls because of the volume of transactions handled by Tomaz in a single year without an alert being generated. The Secretariat said he had the highest total deposit volume on fixed-odds betting platforms in Brazil in 2025, with deposits almost double those of the runner-up.
3. One example cited by the Secretariat came at the end of October 2025. On October 30, Tomaz made 14 deposits of R$ 500,000 on the platform — five in the morning, five in the afternoon, and four at night — for a total of R$ 7 million.
4. The following day, over an 18-minute window, he made 12 withdrawals of R$ 500,000, totaling R$ 6 million. The Secretariat said the pattern could “suggest structuring or disguising of a transaction.”
5. Despite the volume, Blaze classified Tomaz’s account as “medium risk.” The Secretariat said the operator should have considered “atypical online gaming patterns” and treated him as “maximum risk,” adding that the account could also fit the company’s “critical” category because of a “potential systemic violation of applicable law” and a “manifest mismatch between economic-financial capacity and transaction volume.”

The Secretariat also said there were signs of “culpa or dolus” on Blaze’s side for failing to identify and assess the risks around the lawyer’s account. It noted that it was “practically impossible” for a company not to notice a client moving billions of reais.