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Brazilian authorities have blocked 506 websites suspected of offering unauthorized betting, but a parallel government sweep found that gambling promotions were still reaching Brazilian users through major digital platforms after a new prohibition took effect.
The crackdown brings together the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and the Ministry of Finance, with officials trying to close more than the betting sites themselves. The operation is also tracking advertising, alternative domains and other digital routes that can keep gambling services accessible after their primary addresses are blocked.
The 506 domains were identified after a provisional measure prohibited the operation and advertising of fixed-odds betting and online games in Brazil. The government says the sites showed indications of irregular betting activity.
What investigators found on advertising platforms offers a glimpse of the harder part of enforcement.
Nearly 2,000 Google Ads Detected
Between September 25 and 27, Brazil’s Cyber Operations Laboratory, known as Ciberlab, found roughly 1,960 Google advertisements connected to seven domains and displayed to users in Brazil.
The promotions included invitations to open betting accounts, deposit money and play online games for cash.
That figure does not mean investigators established that all 1,960 advertisements violated the new prohibition.
Google’s advertising transparency system allowed Ciberlab to determine when the ads were last displayed, but not when each campaign originally began. Investigators therefore could not reliably separate newly launched advertising from promotions that had already been running before the measure took effect.
That distinction matters because existing advertising was not required to disappear immediately. The new rules provided a ten-day window for material already in circulation to be removed, with that period due to expire on October 5.
Meta Ads Offered Bonuses and Cash Incentives
The picture was clearer on Meta’s platforms.
Investigators documented seven advertisements individually. Five had begun circulating before the new measure took effect and remained active afterward, putting them within the transitional removal period at the time of the government review.
Two others began running on September 25, after the prohibition was already in force. Ciberlab treated those campaigns as new advertising that could, in principle, have breached the ban from the moment they appeared.
The promotions were not limited to conventional sports betting. Investigators encountered casino-game advertising, registration incentives, bonuses and offers of financial rewards designed to draw users onto gambling platforms.
There was another detail that caught the government’s attention.
Some advertisements appeared under page names that differed from the brands being promoted. In other instances, the domain behind the link did not correspond to the betting brand shown in the advertisement.
Ciberlab’s assessment was cautious: those discrepancies could indicate attempts to obscure the identity of the actual advertiser or the eventual destination of users clicking on the ads.
TikTok Presented a Blind Spot
The same examination could not be replicated on TikTok.
Ciberlab reported that the platform’s public advertising library did not include Brazil among the countries available for searches. That prevented investigators from conducting the same type of verification used for Google and Meta.
It is a significant limitation for an enforcement strategy increasingly dependent on being able to follow gambling promotions across platforms rather than simply finding betting websites one by one.
The government now wants technical discussions involving Meta, Google and TikTok, along with representatives of the agencies participating in the operation.
Among the issues identified for those talks are mechanisms to stop new gambling advertisements, remove existing material within the legal deadline, identify pages using disguised identities or masked links, and address promotions distributed through affiliates and influencers.
Investigators also want relevant advertiser data preserved.
Blocking a Domain May Not End the Operation
The 506 websites are part of a broader problem facing regulators: an online betting operation does not necessarily disappear when one domain is blocked.
A service can potentially resurface through another address, while advertising can send users through pages and links that do not obviously carry the operator’s identity. The government operation is therefore intended to identify new domains as they emerge rather than treat the initial blocking list as a finished enforcement action.
The task force itself spans several parts of the federal government. It includes the Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat of Prizes and Betting as well as the Justice Ministry’s national secretariats for Public Security, Consumer Affairs and Digital Rights.
Ciberlab plans to continue monitoring digital platforms for both the removal of existing promotions and the appearance of new advertising methods.
Its technical report also recommended that Meta be formally notified to remove advertisements that began after the prohibition took effect. Three domains were flagged for further examination and possible blocking.
Another sweep is planned after October 5.
That date will matter because the transitional period for advertisements that predated the new measure will have expired. After that point, one of the ambiguities present in the initial monitoring exercise — whether an advertisement was merely awaiting removal under the grace period — should become considerably narrower.
For Brazilian authorities, the first 506 blocked sites may therefore be less an endpoint than an opening count.
Source: gov.br
