Brazil’s betting blackout spreads past .bet.br as blocked sites top 20,000

The scale of the sweep is the headline number here. The Ministry of Justice’s Ciberlab, working jointly with the Finance Ministry’s Secretariat of Prizes and Bets, reported identifying more than 20,000 digital resources tied to betting and its advertising, 16,627 of them full websites, the rest spread across social media profiles and messaging groups. Operators that previously held a Brazilian license have been told to configure the redirect themselves, using their own servers and cloud infrastructure through HTTP status codes, DNS records, or a cloud reverse proxy, rather than waiting for the government to do it for them.

The restrictions now cover addresses across .bet.br, .com, and other extensions, and several familiar international names show up on the list, including Betano, Betfair, bet365, Stake, KTO, and Sportingbet. A separate interagency task force, combining Justice and Finance ministry staff, had already reported taking down 506 sites showing signs of offering unlicensed betting in the campaign’s first weekend alone.

Advertising has been just as hard to stamp out as the sites themselves. The government’s monitoring turned up roughly 2,000 ads on Google alone, all pointing back to just seven domains, and ongoing posts on Meta kept surfacing bonus offers and sign-up calls well after the ban took effect. Authorities haven’t stopped at pulling listings either. They’re pushing to get the matching apps removed from app stores, tracking payments tied to the platforms still operating outside the law, and running criminal investigations with help from agencies that include Interpol.

The broader pattern here lines up with how Brazil’s betting crackdown has unfolded since the ban took hold: enforcement keeps expanding in scope rather than winding down. The country’s banks have already been ordered to close hundreds of accounts tied to unlicensed operators, and a separate set of financial monitoring rules gives the Finance Ministry’s own oversight arm more reach into how money moves through the sector. Operators that once held valid licenses have pushed back through the courts, arguing the ban itself goes too far, but so far that hasn’t slowed the pace of new site takedowns or redirect orders landing on a near-weekly basis.