The Brazilian Government has commenced shutting down of more than 2,000 betting sites, including those that sponsor popular football team Corinthians and other first-division clubs, as part of the government's move to regulate and monitor online gambling.
Brazil is battling with what Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has labelled a betting “pandemic,” triggering the government to put in more efforts in curtailing the ever increasing situation.
For years now, the Latin America’s biggest economy has legalized sports betting sites, making online gambling to operate in a regulatory free-for-all, subject to virtually no rules and regulations or taxes.
In the country, some of the most popular betting sites include bets on sporting fixtures.
Brazilians have also become stucked on gambling games like Aviator, where players gamble on the flight of a virtual airplane, or the online casino game Fortune Tiger.
President of the nation, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration has called on sites that failed to sign up to new regulations to be shut down with effect to take place in January.
The new regulations by the government seeks to fight fraud and money laundering and protect users, via banning of minors from engaging in betting and other similar activities.
In his words he said: " Anyone who is not regularized, or in the process of being regularized, is being taken off the air,”
The president recently warned that, betting was causing many low-income Brazilians to get into debt and other financial challenges.
The Brazil finance ministry said that it had identified and nailed 2,040 “suspicious domains” which it had asked the telecoms regulatory agency Anatel to shut down.
On the blacklist released, has Esportes da Sorte, which sponsors Corinthians, one of Brazil’s most popular football clubs, as well as Athletico Paranaense, Bahia and Gremio de Porto Alegre.
The ministry further said that the betting sites would be shut down and banned from advertising, “which includes, for example, sponsoring football clubs etc.”
Meanwhile, more than 200 other sites will be permitted to continue to its operations after agreeing to the new rules and regulations put in place by the government.
Brazil’s central bank estimates that 24 million out of Brazil’s 212 million inhabitants, roughly one in nine people, gamble online consistently.
