Brazil's Justice Ministry seeks removal of 348 betting influencer accounts as its illegal-site count passes 51,000

Brazil's federal government has turned its betting-ban enforcement toward the influencers who still advertise offshore sites, and its own figures show the number of illegal betting sites it has logged has roughly tripled in a month.

The Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) said in a statement dated November 9 that it had requested the removal of 348 Instagram profiles of digital influencers "used to promote illegal bets." The accounts have more than 150 million followers combined, and one of them has 1.4 million. The monitoring is carried out by the National Secretariat of Digital Rights (Sedigi) and the National Public Security Secretariat (Senasp) through its Cyber Operations Laboratory, known as Ciberlab.

"It is not enough to take illegal betting sites offline if these platforms keep reaching the population through influencers and social networks," Justice Minister Wellington César Lima e Silva said in the statement. The National Secretary of Digital Rights, Victor Fernandes, said the ministry's work "cannot be limited to betting sites" and must also cut off the profiles that use their reach "to attract consumers to prohibited services."

The ministry did not name any of the accounts, say which other platforms received requests, or say how many profiles had already been taken down.

A month of growth in the ministry's tally

On November 9 alone, the ministry said, its monitoring identified 2,207 Facebook pages with a combined audience of 7.5 million, 18 Telegram groups with about 182,000 participants and 998 sites.

Since Provisional Measure 1.394/2026 banned fixed-odds betting and its advertising on September 25, the MJSP has counted more than 60,000 sites, pages, profiles, groups and servers. They include 51,611 sites, 6,596 Facebook pages with 34 million members and followers, more than 900 Instagram profiles, 1,442 Telegram groups with 25.6 million participants and 127 TikTok profiles with 469,000 followers.

The ministry's October 9 update put the total at 20,318, of which 16,627 were betting sites. At that point Ciberlab had logged 1,974 pages and 560 profiles, 1,027 Telegram groups with 18,456,115 users, 14 WhatsApp groups, one Discord server with 26,589 members and 115 TikTok profiles with 459,109 followers. In late September, a September 24 statement reported 1,274 Facebook pages and 93 Instagram profiles flagged between September 1 and 24.

Senasp head Chico Lucas said the platforms "reach millions of people, often through influencers they trust," leading to debt and gambling dependency.

The influencer requests come as the ban is challenged in court. A day earlier, on November 8, Supreme Federal Court Justice Luiz Fux suspended lower-court cases challenging MP 1.394 until the court rules on the measure's constitutionality. The ministry has also classified the documents behind the measure for five years, and police in the Federal District last week froze up to R$3.48 billion in an illegal-betting investigation.