Instagram recommends illegal betting profiles to 84% of users in Brazil

A study by Rede em Jogo, a project from CondadoLab at PUC-Rio and published by Intercept, mapped more than 55,000 Instagram accounts and found that 84% of the betting operators most recommended by the platform are operating without authorization in Brazil. For PSPs, the point is not just traffic: Meta’s recommendation engine is helping push users toward clandestine gambling businesses, tipster accounts, and the payment flows that sit behind them.

1. The study cross-checked Instagram’s recommendation patterns against the official list from the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas to identify which operators are acting irregularly. The result is blunt: once a user follows a betting account, the platform starts recommending dozens of similar profiles, and four in five of the operators surfaced in this ecosystem are illegal in Brazil.
2. The 100 most recommended profiles on the algorithm already account for more than 6 million followers and 114,000 posts. They break down into three groups: betting operators, specialized content creators, and media outlets focused on the gambling market. In practice, that means the recommendation layer is not just surfacing brands; it is building a distribution channel for the whole betting stack.
3. One example in the report is Pedro, a creator who promotes a “super promotion of premium group, which has higher odds.” He charges R$ 397,00 per month for access, but offers it for R$ 14,91 monthly on the annual plan. The group runs on Telegram, where he shares sports picks, operator recommendations, and higher odds.
4. The same pattern appears across creators who call themselves tipsters, sports traders, or “professional bettors.” They sell the idea of expertise through subscriptions, automated spreadsheets, bots, and access to private groups. The pitch is familiar: “leave CLT,” guaranteed financial return, and access to “the income of your dreams.”
5. The study also says humor works as reinforcement. Memes, sketches, and short videos normalize risky behavior and make compulsive betting harder to spot. The effect is a reframing of gambling itself: games that depend entirely on chance are presented as games of skill, and winning is recast as competence rather than luck.

The same mechanism is described in profiles focused on online casinos, including accounts built around “jogo do Tigrinho.” For high-risk operators and their payment providers, the commercial issue is obvious: recommendation systems do not just drive discovery, they can scale exposure to unauthorized brands and the services that monetize them.