Brazil’s licensed betting sector is pushing back after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva used his International Women’s Day address to call for joint action by the government, Congress and the judiciary so that online casinos do not keep indebting families. The remarks came a little over a year after Brazil’s federally regulated fixed-odds betting market went live on January 1, 2025.
The industry response has been blunt. Licensed operators and market advisers say Brazil already has a legal framework, federal authorizations, responsible gambling rules and a national self-exclusion tool, so any move toward prohibition would hit compliant companies first while illegal sites kept chasing Brazilian players from outside the formal system.
Lula puts ban talk back on the table
In the March 7 speech, Lula said gambling addiction was hurting Brazilian homes and that the burden often falls on women when household money disappears on phone screens. He added that casinos are banned in Brazil and said there was no sense in letting “Jogos do Tigrinho” enter people’s homes and drive families into debt by mobile phone.
Lula said he wanted the state executive, Congress and the judiciary working together to stop online casinos from destroying households, which reopened ban talk at a time when the federal government is still running the market it chose to regulate.
Brazil already has a federal system in place
Brazil’s current framework rests on Law 14.790, signed at the end of 2023, which put fixed-odds betting into a competitive system under federal authorization. Since January 1, 2025, only companies authorized by the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting have been allowed to operate nationally, and federally authorized sites use the .bet.br domain.
The government has also spent the past year adding controls rather than rolling them back. In December 2025, the Finance Ministry launched a centralized self-exclusion platform covering all authorized betting sites, and the SPA says it had blocked more than 25,000 illegal sites by January 2026.
The licensed market says the real leak is the black market
That is why the backlash from the legal sector has centered on channelization, not just politics. The consensus being that a ban would not erase demand, but would instead send players back toward unlicensed operators that do not follow Brazilian rules on authorization, identity checks, certification and responsible gambling.
The legal market has also spent months working with regulators on that exact problem. In September 2025, the SPA, Anatel and ANJL signed a cooperation agreement to improve the detection and blocking of illegal betting sites, and ANJL and IBJR also announced joint action against the illegal market.
Any ban would still need a new political fight
For now, Lula’s remarks do not change the law. Reversing the current system would take a new legislative process against a market the federal government itself licensed, structured and expanded with new compliance and consumer protection tools.
So the immediate picture is still the same. Authorized operators remain legal, the federal framework remains in force, and the clash Lula opened this week is political for now, not operational.
