Brazil trade body identifies over 800 influencers promoting illegal betting on Instagram
More than 800 influencer profiles have been using Instagram to promote links to illegal betting sites in Brazil.
This was revealed in a survey from the LegitBet platform, used by the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL), a Brazilian gambling trade body, to monitor the illegal market.
The 802 profiles were identified from a database of 48,318 profiles monitored by the system, with data consolidated on 2 November.
The monitoring worked via rounds that were conducted periodically, starting shortly before the beginning of the regulated market on 1 January 2025. The 802 profiles in the consolidated survey represent those already identified by the monitoring, and not the total number existing on Instagram.
The actual size may be much larger, considering that a single round of just over an hour revealed hundreds of profiles promoting the activity.
The speed of the discoveries is striking: in a single monitoring round, for example, carried out on 27 October, the system checked 908 profiles in just an hour and 25 minutes, of which 626 were identified as sharing links to suspected gambling sites. In the same round, 500 new addresses were found, of which 396 showed a pattern of affiliate links.
One relevant statistic that illustrates the scale of the problem is that 73% of profiles have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. A 23.6% share of the total had between 100,000 and 1 million followers.
Recurring publications
Another concerning factor revealed by the monitoring is that almost 74% of the 802 profiles made recurring posts, meaning there was a new advertisement with suspicious links related to illegal gambling at least once every three days.
The influencers identified by Legitbet published links that directed viewers to 844 different websites. The most widely shared link was present on the social media of 86 profiles.
According to the president of ANJL, the data is alarming for several reasons. First, considering that 74% of the 802 profiles have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, the potential reach of the posts ranges from 5.9 million to 59.4 million people.
“We are talking about just one of the many networks available on the internet,” said ANJL President Plínio Lemos Jorge. “And it is important to highlight the following: Instagram allows teenagers as young as 13 to open accounts. This entire audience is also exposed to these influencers and illegal websites, which do not prohibit access for minors.”
Fight weakened by the provisional measure
Before Provisional Measure 1,394, which banned the licensed betting market in Brazil, the ANJL had already been working to explain this scenario to big tech companies and demand effective responses from them to take down the profiles.
In early September, the association sent an extrajudicial notification to Meta, Google, TikTok and X, asking the companies to present a permanent plan to combat the advertisements. ANJL requested the adoption of a comprehensive plan to identify, remove, de-index and block profiles, applications and content from influencers that promote illegal sports betting operators in Brazil.
There were no responses to the notifications. Now, with the ban on the legalised market, the fight against these disclosures on social media has been weakened.
“ANJL, like other entities, continues to represent the fixed-odds betting sector,” Lemos Jorge added. “But the sudden and unilateral decision by the federal government to extinguish the market has made dialogue between legalised betting companies and big tech companies more difficult because what has been created in Brazil is great confusion and legal uncertainty, in which only these illegal companies are winning.”
According to the ANJL, protecting bettors depends on continuous monitoring of the profiles that advertise, the websites that receive users and the payment methods that support these operations.