ANJL's legal advisor sees "collusion with crime" in a potential ban on legalized betting companies.

ANJL legal consultant and founding partner of BetLaw, Bernardo Freire, classified a possible ban on legalized betting companies as “complicity with crime” and warned of the risk of users migrating to clandestine platforms. The statement was made this Friday (14), during the seminar “Post-regulation challenges of the betting market”, promoted by the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL) in partnership with Editora Globo.

“For me, wanting to prohibit a legalized company, to take away online gambling, without any basis, without any relevance, without any urgency, is complicity with crime. These companies take every precaution regarding the LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law), the prevention and combating of money laundering, and the protection of minors. If you remove this legal market, you end up pushing users into illegality, when 40% of the population already accesses the illegal market. You will throw another 60% into the illegal market. For me, this has no other term: it is complicity with the weakening of protection against money laundering, with the weakening of protection against indebtedness, and with the weakening of protection against gambling addiction, which the government, when it wants to create new restrictions, ends up pointing to as causes,” he stated.

According to the expert, maintaining a regulated market is important to guarantee control mechanisms over platforms and protect bettors. He highlighted the need to reconcile the monitoring of user behavior with data protection as stipulated in the General Data Protection Law (LGPD), in addition to measures to prevent money laundering (AML), indebtedness, and gambling addiction.

According to Freire, authorized companies increasingly need to adopt mechanisms capable of identifying risky behaviors and suspicious operations, while still respecting users' rights. Responsibility, in this scenario, involves both protecting the bettor and fulfilling legal obligations of oversight and reporting to the authorities.

The debate on responsibility and protection of bettors took place during the seminar, which brought together representatives from the sector to discuss the upcoming challenges of regulation in Brazil.