FactCheck BNLData: Report on minors and gambling ignores the difference between the legal and illegal markets.
The article ' When do boys start gambling? How many teenagers gamble? Research reveals shocking data ' published by Estadão, based on research by the Mixed Parliamentary Front for Education in partnership with Equidade.info (an initiative of the Lemann Center at Stanford's Graduate School of Education), shows that Brazilian boys start gambling online at age 11 and that almost half of high school students have gambled at least once. In total, 27,8% of boys and 12,6% of girls say they have gambled.
The data is real, it was collected using research methodology in schools across the country, and it represents a legitimate social problem. None of this is in dispute.
What the report doesn't say
The problem isn't the data. It's the framing. From beginning to end of the text, the word "bets" is used as a synonym for a single, undifferentiated market. At no point does the report mention:
⇒ that access by minors is expressly prohibited on platforms licensed by the Prizes and Betting Secretariat (SPA) of the Ministry of Finance;
⇒ that these platforms are required to perform identity verification through facial recognition (KYC) , and not just self-declaration of age;
⇒ that there is an exclusive domain, .bet.br , created precisely so that bettors can identify which is a regulated betting site and which is not;
⇒ that Congress itself, in the same matter, when describing the "Brazil against betting" bill, acknowledges the existence of a clandestine market separate from the regulated one — to the point of proposing the criminalization of the promotion of clandestine companies by influencers.
This last contradiction is revealing: the text uses the category "clandestine" when discussing advertising, but abandons this distinction when the subject is adolescent behavior. It's as if the same market were simultaneously divided (for regulatory purposes) and uniform (for purposes of social alarm) — depending on the convenience of the argument.
The question the report doesn't ask.
The researcher interviewed for the report, Guilherme Lichand, himself states that the number of minors gambling “should be zero,” since the practice is prohibited. This is a correct statement—but the report never addresses the obvious question it itself raises: if it's prohibited and there are identity verification mechanisms on licensed platforms, where are these teenagers getting in?
The most plausible answer—and the one that any minimally diligent investigation into the subject should seek—is the illegal market, which today accounts for an estimated 38% to 44% of all betting volume in Brazil, operates without any biometric verification and, in general, without any barrier beyond a click of self-declaration. The report mentions in passing that licensed betting sites would have to restrict themselves, under the new bill, to "self-exclusion mechanisms" and institutional communication—that is, it acknowledges the existence of regulated protection mechanisms—but does not connect this fact to the central problem of the matter.
Why does it matter
By blurring the line between legal and illegal platforms, the report leads the reader to a mistaken conclusion: that the problem lies in the regulated market, when the very set of facts cited in the text (mandatory biometrics, .bet.br domain, explicit prohibition, self-exclusion mechanisms) points to the opposite — the answer to the problem is more oversight of the illegal market and more dissemination of how to identify a licensed betting site , not the dismantling or general stigmatization of the regulated sector.
This is not a technical detail. It is the difference between journalism that helps the reader protect themselves and a text that, through omission, hinders precisely that protection—at the same time as it rightly warns about the risks of exposing children and adolescents to gambling.
What is proven in practice
The research data is not proof of regulatory failure. It is proof that the illegal market—without biometrics, without identity verification, without an identifiable domain—is the environment where this unauthorized access happens easily. The right approach, based on this same survey, would be to demand more oversight of clandestine domains and more institutional campaigns teaching bettors (and their parents) to recognize .bet.br—not treating "bets," as a whole, as the villain of the story.
