Lula presses the Central Bank over a bettor’s 1,400 Pix transfers, but Brazil already has betting controls in place

In a campaign live on Sunday, September 13, 2026, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) used the case of a bettor who allegedly made 1,400 Pix transfers in three months to attack Brazil’s sports betting sector and ask why the Central Bank had not flagged the pattern. For PSPs and acquirers, the more relevant detail is that the betting regulator already has a daily reporting system that is supposed to catch exactly this kind of activity.

1. Lula said he met eight people he described as “victims of bets” earlier that day, and told supporters that he had heard of a bettor who made 1,400 Pix transactions in three months. He asked publicly why the Central Bank had not identified “too many Pix” to the same company, and said the government would “work seriously” on the issue.
2. He also said he spoke with a woman who “saw a 26-year-old son kill himself” and that he had been in a meeting where someone “owed R$ 2 billion in just 3 months.” Lula repeated that he is “discussing” what to do with bets and said his preference is to “close” the companies, calling the market “an uncontrollable thing.”
3. The problem with directing the complaint at the Central Bank is simple: the bank does not regulate betting in Brazil. Under the law, authorization, monitoring, supervision, and sanctions for fixed-odds betting operators are handled by the Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA/MF).
4. That same SPA already has a system designed to flag individual transaction patterns. Since the start of 2025, the Sistema de Gestão de Apostas (Sigap), developed by Serpro for the SPA/MF, has been monitoring licensed operators on a daily basis.
5. Under the Ministry of Finance’s rules, companies must send six file types to Sigap, five daily and one monthly. These include customer registration data and wallet activity — in other words, how much money went in and out of the account used for betting — plus files specific to sports betting and online games, and a broader daily snapshot of each company’s operations. The SPA can also request additional information from operators when it deems necessary.

So if a single bettor really made 1,400 Pix transfers in three months to the same company, that is exactly the sort of pattern Sigap is meant to see. The operational question for PSPs is not whether the Central Bank should be watching betting flows; it is whether licensed operators and their payment chains are feeding the SPA clean enough data, fast enough, for the regulator to act on it.