Lawyer argues for regulation of betting in Brazil to protect bettors.

A lawyer specializing in gaming and betting published an article on JOTA.Info defending the regulation of the betting market in Brazil as opposed to prohibition. Tiago Gomes, a partner in the Gaming & Betting area of ​​the Souto Correa Advogados law firm, argues that banning the sector does not eliminate demand, but removes protections for bettors and hands the market over to crime.

In the text published this Saturday (August 15), Gomes argues that Brazil arrived late to a debate already concluded in dozens of jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain, and France, where the discussion is no longer about the existence of the regulated market, but about the quality of oversight.

The Chinese case as a central argument.

The author uses China as the most compelling example of the failure of prohibition. The country has the most comprehensive repressive apparatus in the world and applies severe sanctions against illegal gambling. Even so, the results are limited; in 2021 alone, more than 100 people were arrested for illegal gambling in the country. In 2024, approximately 4.500 platforms were shut down and 73 investigations were opened into operations that crossed the border, according to data cited by Gomes.

The illegal gambling market in China generates approximately $140 billion annually, according to estimates cited in several studies and referenced in the article. This amount is equivalent to roughly ten times the size of the country's own legal state lotteries and represents nearly half of the entire illegal gambling market on the planet. For Gomes, this data demonstrates that "the genie doesn't go back into the bottle."

What does regulation offer?

The article lists the tools that regulation makes possible and that the black market does not offer: identity verification to bar minors, a self-exclusion mechanism that blocks the bettor from all bookmakers simultaneously, a ban on credit betting, and monitoring of sports integrity against match-fixing.

Gomes describes the difference between the two markets with a straightforward formulation: “The difference between the regulated and illegal markets is not who profits. It's who is held accountable.” In the illegal market, he states, the operator doesn't ask for identification, doesn't offer a way out to the gambler with problems, and simply disappears when the situation worsens, leaving the bill for the family and society.

The author acknowledges that Brazil has an estimated base of over 20 million gamblers and that, even if the percentage with addiction is small, the absolute number of people affected is significant. The damage, he says, impacts families, jobs, and financial health.

Risk of tightening too much.

Gomes also warns of the opposite risk: that of regulation so restrictive that it practically amounts to prohibition. According to him, when the legal environment becomes more difficult and hostile than the clandestine one, the gambler does not give up gambling, but migrates back to the uncontrolled market. An excessively restrictive regulation, he concludes, would reap "the worst of both worlds"; it would distance the citizen from the only environment where he was protected.

The article was published with JOTA.Info's standard disclaimer that contributors' opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the publication.