Lula signed Provisional Measure No. 1.394/2026 on September 25, ending fixed-odds sports betting and online casino gaming in the country less than three years after his own government regulated the industry. Monitoring platform Bet Legal found 428 new illegal betting sites appeared between the announcement and September 27, about 143 a day, up sharply from the 62 a day recorded in the days before the ban when Lula was already threatening action. Additionally, that’s around ten times the average of 13.7 new illegal domains a day tracked by trade group ANJL between June and August.
At the same time, enforcement capacity is very weak against the rise of the illegal market, as Brazil’s Prizes and Betting Secretariat has just four staff members managing nearly 200 authorized sites and thousands of illegal ones, and has spent only R275,600 of the R1 million set aside for supervision during 2026. Consultancy LCA Consultores estimates that illegal operators already made up 38% to 44% of the market before the ban, and a survey of 2,291 bettors found 77% had used an illegal platform at some point.
The ban also removes consumer protections that only applied to licensed platforms, including facial biometrics, credit card bans, self-exclusion tools, deposit limits, and automatic blocking for welfare recipients.
