Brasília Court Gives Spribe Ten Days to Cut Aviator Off Unlicensed Operators

Prosecutors want R$110m from the Estonian developer for letting the "little plane" fly on unauthorised sites. The judge refused to ground the game outright, but ordered Spribe to name every partner, suspend the illegal integrations and geo-block, at R$100,000 a day.

• The Federal District prosecutors' office (MPDFT) filed a public civil action on 10 September against Spribe OÜ, the Estonian company behind Aviator, seeking R$110 million, about $20 million, in collective moral damages, BNLData reports
• The 7th Civil Court of Brasília partially granted urgent relief, refusing a total suspension of the game as "excessively burdensome and disproportionate" before Spribe has been heard
• Within ten days Spribe must identify every operator, aggregator and distributor linked to Aviator, disclose domains, integrations, credentials and APIs, immediately suspend integrations with operators not authorised in Brazil, and implement monitoring, traceability, geo-restriction and blocking
• Non-compliance carries a fine of R$100,000 a day, initially capped at R$10 million; the request to suspend Aviator entirely can be revisited after the defence and technical evidence
• Spribe's own figures cited in the case put the crash game at about 60 million monthly active players, 400,000 bets a minute and roughly US$17.4 billion a month in 2025

The Supplier, Not the Operator, Is the Defendant

Brazilian enforcement against unlicensed betting has reached the game supplier, and the first target is the most played crash game in the market.

The Ministério Público do Distrito Federal e Territórios filed a public civil action on Thursday 10 September against Spribe OÜ, the Estonian developer, licensor and owner of Aviator, according to BNLData. The action seeks R$110 million in collective moral damages and alleges that the game is made available on betting platforms not authorised to operate in Brazil, even after the corrective measures the company says it has adopted. The damages figure was derived from an estimated annual Spribe revenue of US$200 million, converted at R$5.50 to R$1.1 billion, of which 10% was taken as the parameter; the court would set any final amount by reference to the seriousness and duration of the conduct, the number of consumers affected, the game's reach in Brazil, the company's economic gain and financial capacity, the controls it adopted and the extent of the harm.

The 7th Civil Court of Brasília granted the urgent relief in part. The judge declined to suspend Aviator on all platforms, including those regularly authorised, finding that such a measure would be "excessively burdensome and disproportionate" before the adversarial phase, and expressly left the question open for reassessment once Spribe has answered and technical evidence has been produced. In its place the decision imposes a set of obligations to be met within ten days: a technical report identifying the operators, aggregators, distributors and authorised partners connected to Aviator; disclosure of the domains, integrations, credentials and APIs through which the game is made available; the immediate suspension of integrations with operators not authorised in Brazil; the implementation of continuous monitoring, traceability, geo-restriction and blocking mechanisms; and the preservation of contracts, records, logs and other evidence relating to distribution. Each breach carries a daily fine of R$100,000, initially capped at R$10 million.

What Convinced the Judge

The judge found that the documents in the case indicated Spribe acts as developer, licensor and holder of the Aviator technology, with audit and monitoring mechanisms "capable of identifying the use of the product by unauthorised operators". Despite that, technical reports produced during the investigation pointed to the repeated presence of the game on multiple irregular platforms after the measures the company had communicated. Part of the file remains under restricted access, including technical reports, digital evidence, intelligence records, contracts, credentials, APIs, logs and audit trails that would reveal investigative methodology or Spribe's technical architecture.

Spribe has been in Brazilian courts before, on the other side: in April it won an injunction against Flutter's Betnacional over use of the Aviator name, part of a global trademark campaign that has produced rulings in Malta and the United Kingdom this year.

The Court Has Accepted That a Supplier Can See Where Its Game Runs, and Must Act on It

The importance of the order is less the fine than the finding behind it. Spribe's defence of its brand in trademark cases has rested on being the developer, licensor and owner of Aviator with control over who may offer it; the Brasília court has taken that position at face value and turned it into a duty. If the licensor can audit and monitor where its product appears, it can be required to switch off the operators the state has not authorised, and to prove it with logs. That reasoning does not depend on anything specific to Aviator. Every studio distributing through aggregators into Brazil has the same API keys and the same reports, and the MPDFT has now shown a court will treat those as the means of enforcement. Suppliers that have relied on the aggregator layer to keep them at arm's length from the grey market have ten days' notice of how that argument fares.

Ten Days, Then the Real Question

The judge's refusal to ground the game on authorised platforms is a genuine limit; the court did not accept that a popular product should be taken from licensed operators to punish a supplier for unlicensed ones. But the refusal was expressly provisional, and the order to disclose every integration and preserve every log is discovery by another name. If the technical report shows integrations Spribe cannot or will not sever, the suspension request returns with evidence behind it. It arrives in the same week the Finance Ministry published its rules for banks to freeze unauthorised operators' accounts within 24 hours and the president promised a decision on the sector. Brazil is closing on the illegal market from the payment side, the platform side and now the content side at once, and the licensed operators carrying Aviator are watching a court decide whether their most popular game stays on their sites.

The state has found the point of control behind the unlicensed sites. Spribe has ten days to show it can use it.