The Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA) is the secretariat within Brazil's Ministry of Finance that regulates fixed-odds betting and online gaming under the 2023 law that legalised them, issuing the ordinances that set licensing, technical, payment, anti-money-laundering, advertising and responsible-gambling rules for the market that opened on 1 January 2025. It grants federal authorisations to operators, maintains the list of licensed brands, orders the blocking of unlicensed domains and enforces the prohibition on sign-up bonuses and the 2026 advertising ordinances.
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The ANJL wants the platforms to run a permanent programme to find, remove, de-index and block the influencers who funnel Brazilians to unlicensed betting sites, and to stop the accounts coming back under new names. It puts the illegal market at 38% to 44%.
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.
BLIK now checks every transaction against the Finance Ministry's register of illegal gambling domains and declines the matches. Brazil is doing the same job by loading obligations onto banks and fintechs instead. Both are admissions that domain blocking stopped working.
Three associations issued statements within hours of each other. All three make the same point: the regulator was missing too, and the figures presented to the president went untested.
The Brazilian president spent four hours hearing evidence against the industry his own government licensed two years ago. The Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas, which regulates it, does not appear on the attendance list.
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.
Brazil's Ministry of Finance has published new advertising rules that require every betting ad to carry a financial-loss warning and outlaw urgency and easy-money messaging, tightening the screws on a sector that spent R$1.44 billion, approximately $260 million, promoting itself last year.