Typically, researchers in Brazil spent this year doing something nobody at Meta appears to have bothered with. They followed a single betting account on Instagram, let the recommendation engine run, and then checked whether the operators it served back were actually legal. As of September 2026, the anser is that 84 percent of them were not.
The study comes from Rede em Jogo, a research project run out of CondadoLab at PUC Rio, and was published on 14 September. The team analysed more than 55,000 Instagram accounts, narrowed the set to the 100 most recommended betting profiles, and cross referenced every operator behind them against the authorisation list kept by Brazil's Secretariat of Prizes and Bets, the Ministry of Finance body that maintains the authorised operator register. Those 100 profiles hold more than 6 million combined followers and have published roughly 114,000 posts beween them.
No kidding, eighty four of every hundred operators the algorithm pushed hardest were not on the register.
How one follow turns into a feed full of unlicensed casinos
Actually, the mechanic the researchers documented is the important part, and it is depressingly simple.... A user does not need to search for gambling... Following one account with any betting association is enugh. From that single signal, Instagram begins populating the recommendation surface with related profiles, and it keeps going.
The 100 profiles split into three types. There are operators running their own brand accounts. , There are content creators, the tipsters and self described sports traders and professional gamblers.... And there are specialised betting mdeia pages that look like journalism and function like distribution.
Generally, the creator tier is where the monetisation gets interesting. The study logged one influencer selling access to a private predictions group at a list price of BRL 397 per month, discounted in promotion to BRL 14.91 per month on an annual plan... That is not a gambling prodcut.... That is a subscription business built on top of one, with the casino traffic as the real revenue event downstream..... regulators have a framework for licensing operators.... They do not have one for licensing the people who sell the on ramp.
Brazil made legality machine readable and it still did not help
This is the detail that makes the 84 percent fiugre genuinely damning rather than merely bad. Brazil did not build a vague, judgment call regime. It built a whitelist. Even so, Under Law 14.790/2023 and the authorisation process set out in Portaria SPA/MF 827/2024, an operator licensed in Brazil must run on a .bet.br domain... not ...com, not .net, not a country code workaround. The transition periood expired on 1 January 2026, which means there is no grace window left to hide in. As of 30 June 2026 the SPA portal listed 87 operators holding active licences with 14 applications pending, down from 113 at the start of the first quarter after 26 operators were revoked or suspended for non compliance.Make no mistake, so the compliance test here is not a legal opinion. It is a string check on a domain name, cross referenced agaist a public list of 87 companies. A junior developer could ship that filter in an afternoon. Instagrams recommendation engine, which can infer that you are interested in betting from one follow, apparently cannot infer which of the resulting profiles ends in .bet.br.
According to CryptoCasino.Vegas research combining the PUC Rio recommendation data with the SPA register and the most recnet Brazilian market survey, the gap between the regulated market and the discovered market looks like this
| Measure | Figure | Source period |
|---|---|---|
| Operators holding an active Brazilian licence | 87 | 30 June 2026 |
| Licences revoked or suspended since Q1 | 26 | Q1 to Q2 2026 |
| Share of top 100 recommended operators that are unlicensed | 84% | September 2026 |
| Instagram accounts analysed | 55,000+ | September 2026 |
| Combined followers accross the top 100 profiles | 6 million+ | September 2026 |
| Bettors using domains other than ....bet.br | 48% | May 2026 survey |
| Illegal share of online betting turnover | 38% to 44% | H1 2026 |
Enforcement is pointed at the wrong layer of the stack
Brazil has not been passive... Beween January 2025 and June 2026 the Ministry of Finance took down 937 influencer pages for breaching online gambling rules. Of those, 803 were promoting clandestine betting platforms outright and 134 broke other market regulations. The ministry opened 86 monitoring proceedings into digital influencers and electronic media advertising, plus 46 inspection processes specifically on child and adolescent protecton, including two cases of betting company logos appearing on sports kit worn by children.
The financial penalties tell you how seriously this is landing... Three fines, totalling just under BRL 4 million across eighteen months.
| Brazilian enforcement action | Volume | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Influencer pages removed | 937 | Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 |
| Of which promoted clandestine platforms | 803 | Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 |
| Fines issued | 3, totalling under BRL 4m | Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 |
| Monitoring proceedings opened | 86 | Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 |
| Child protectoin inspections | 46 | Jan 2025 to Jun 2026 |
| Maximum advertising fine available | About BRL 14m (about $2.7m) | From July 2026 |
In July 2026 the Ministry of Finance published tougher advertising rules, adding mandatory tobacco style warnings that betting makes you lose money, that betting can cause addiction, and that betting is not an investment. Operators can be fined up to 20 percent of revenue, suspended for 180 days, or stripped of a licence, and they are now accountable for what their contracted influencers post. Finance Minister Dario Durigan was blunt about it, saying the goverment has zero tolerance for illegal operators and that neither advertisers nor media outlets may run advertising for a company not authorised to operate.
Every one of those instruments governs advertising. That is the loophole, and it is not a small one. An organic recommendation is not an advertisement... Nobody paid for it, no advertiser can be fined for it, and no mdeia outlet carried it.... Brazils Attorney Generals Office has already pushed Meta on this, giving the company 48 hours to pull ads for unauthorised betting sites and stating afterwards that its verification processes remain insufficient... But even total compliance on paid placement leaves the recommendation engine untouched, still performing the same distrbiution job for free.
What the 84 percent figure actually measures
Worth being precise here, because the number is going to get quoted carelessly. It measures licensing status in one jurisdiction. It does not measure whether a site pays out, whether its RNG is certified, or whether it is a scam.Plenty of the operators in that 84 percent are large internaitonal brands running .com domains with licences from Curacao, Malta or the Isle of Man....... They are unlicensed in Brazil specifically... Crypto casinos sit in the same bucket almost by construction, since a .bet.br licence requires local incorporation, local payment rails and facial recognition at signup, which is not a combination most crypto native operators are built to delivr.That nuance matters to anyone reading this from outside Brazil.. It does not help the Brazilian player, though, because the recommendation surface flattens all of it into the same infinite scroll. A well run offshore operator and an exit scam in waiting get identical algorithmic treatment.... The feed is not ranking by solvency.
The crypto share of the unlicensed makret
Broadly, the behavioural data underneath this comes from a survey of 2,291 Brazilian bettors conducted in May 2026 by LCA Consultores and the Locomotiva Institute for the Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming. The illegal market held 38 to 44 percent of online betting in the first half of 2026, down from 41 to 51 percent a year erlier, so enforcement is moving the number, slowly.
The composition is the interesting part. Among bettors, 51 percent used unlicensed platforms exclusively and another 36 percent placed most of their bets there. Fifty three percent had bet on sites with no facial recognition. Thirty seven percent deposited by credit card, which is prohibited in the regulaetd market.... And 23 percent deposited with cryptocurrency.
That last figure is the one to sit with..... Nearly a quarter of Brazilian players on unlicensed sites are already funding accounts with crypto, without any of it being framed as a crypto casino decision. They followed a tipster, got recommended an operator, and picked the deposit metohd that worked. Meanwhile 77 percent of the same respondents agreed that illegal betting sites do not comply with responsible gambling rules. , They know. They play anyway, because the discovery path never presented an alternative.
What players should actually do about it
The practical takeaway is narrow and useful. A recommendation is a measure of engagement, not of legitimacy, and treating your feed as a vetting layer is how 6 million followers ended up pointed at operators that a govenment register would have disqualified in one lookup.
Three checks cost nothing. Look at the domain, because in Brazil the licensed set ends in .bet.br and nowhere else. Look up the operator on the regulators public list rather than trusting a badge rendered on the site itself..... Since a badge is an image file and an image file proves nothig.. , And treat a paid predictions group as what it is, a subscription that profits whether or not you do.
Transparency at the operator level is the other half of it. Platforms that state their licensing jurisdiction, their payout process and their withdrawal terms in plain language spare players the reverse engineering. CryptoCasino.Vegas publishes its terms and processes withdrawals witout a manual review queue, which is a low bar that a surprising number of the profiles in this study cannot clear.
Brazil built the register, built the domain rule, expired the transition period and started issuing fines... It did all of the hard regulatory work. Then it discovered that the distribution layer does not hold a licence, cannot be fined, and answers to nobody in Brasilia. That probem is not going to stay Brazilian for long.
