Pixbet is a Brazilian sportsbook founded in 2020 by the Paraíba entrepreneur Ernildo Júnior de Farias Santos, who remains its principal shareholder and chief executive. He had been building online betting businesses in the north east for close to a decade beforehand, running a network of betting shops from 2012 and launching the site Futebol Fácil in 2013. The brand became one of the most visible in Brazilian football sponsorship, backing Flamengo, Vasco da Gama, Corinthians, Santos, Avaí and Juventude, and it holds authorisation from the Ministry of Finance to operate in the regulated market. Its name is a reference to Pix, the Brazilian central bank's instant payment system, whose ubiquity is a large part of why the Brazilian betting market scaled as quickly as it did.
Betano, Superbet, Sportingbet and EstrelaBet now send Brazilian visitors to a government page that says their platforms are offline by order of Provisional Measure 1.394. Justice Luiz Fux let the operators' midnight deadline pass without a decision, and R$1.33 billion of unclaimed player money now passes to the banks.
Messages taken from the jailed banker's phone by the Federal Police show Banco Master's legal director telling Daniel Vorcaro he "cannot appear" after the Finance Ministry asked who stood behind a fund that owned part of Bet.Bet, Valor Econômico reports. A dispatcher from Minas Gerais was later named instead.
Diomar Tadeu Dantas de Farias was taken into preventive custody in Jacumã on Thursday morning as the second phase of the money-laundering inquiry served five more warrants against the bookmaker's leadership. The Receita Federal says offshore companies were set up to make a Brazilian-run operation look foreign; the law firm that represents Pixbet says it only ever did the lawyering.
In a WhatsApp exchange from October 2024 found on the phone of a former Federal Police clerk, the Banco Master owner is described as the "boss" who owns the bookmaker and a quarter of Atlético Mineiro. The messages are now part of the Compliance Zero inquiry. Vorcaro's lawyers will not comment; Pixbet says he has never held a stake.
A childhood and youth court in Campina Grande has told the Finance Ministry and the telecoms regulator to remove Pixbet's sites and apps, fined it R$4.7 million and appointed an expert to test whether its age checks work at all.
The penalty is modest by the standards of Brazilian enforcement. The reason it had to be served through the official gazette is not: the regulator went to the address Pixbet has on file and the company was not there.