Brazil bettors file over 10,000 lawsuits

• Predictus has mapped 10,627 lawsuits filed against Brazilian betting operators since 2018, with volume accelerating sharply after the Betting Law took effect in late 2023.
• Blocked withdrawals and account suspensions dominate the complaints, and addiction-related claims are climbing fast from a low base.
• Bettors won fully or partially in 59.2% of the 3,438 cases decided so far.

Predictus, a Brazilian legal data firm, has identified 10,627 lawsuits filed against online betting operators since 2018, according to a survey commissioned by BBC News Brasil.

Case volume has climbed sharply since Brazil’s Betting Law took effect in late 2023, driven largely by blocked withdrawals, frozen accounts, and a fast-growing run of gambling addiction claims.

The regulated market generated R$37 billion in revenue in 2025, its first full year under the new rules.

Blocked withdrawals lead

Predictus scanned 630 million court records nationwide using artificial intelligence, pulling every case naming a betting company as a party. Of the total, 44.1% remain in progress, 17.9% were dismissed without a ruling on the merits, and 38% have reached a decision.

The filing pace tells its own story: 5,488 cases landed in 2025 alone, and another 4,037 arrived between January and May 2026, putting this year on course to overtake the last.

Money recovery is the sticking point behind most claims, split across three buckets: blocked accounts (636 cases), unilateral changes to platform rules (629), and outright withdrawal blocks (429).

Hendrik Eichler, chief executive of Predictus, said the rule-change pattern is consistent, an operator quietly alters a condition it had already agreed to, and the practical effect is that the money stays put.

A case brought by a client of lawyer Felipe Bezerra da Silva shows the mechanics. The bettor had withdrawals blocked from February 2025 onward and, after running up R$1.15 million in casino winnings, found his account shut down unilaterally.

The operator’s lawyers told the court the payout stemmed from a systemic game glitch and was therefore not owed. The suit, filed in May 2025, is now before the 9th Civil Court of the Guarulhos District.

Felipe Bezerra da Silva, the bettor’s lawyer, said:

“In my client’s case, he earned this money in the first half of 2025. With the delays in the judicial system, he will receive it in three, four, five, six years. For them [companies], this is profit.”

The Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming (IBJR), representing more than 20 operators, declined to comment when approached for the survey.

Addiction claims climb

Suits citing gambling addiction directly are still a small slice of the total, but the growth curve is steep: seven in 2024, 27 in 2025, and 52 more between January and May 2026. Claims alleging a failure of duty of care, grounded in a responsible gambling decree published in August 2025, jumped from 15 cases in 2024 to 243 in the first five months of 2026.

Marco Aurélio Leite, a lawyer who says he now represents gamblers in over 500 lawsuits nationwide, puts the surge down to bettors’ growing confidence that judges will side with them.

Describing how operators respond to warning signs instead of curbing them, he said:

“When a bettor stops depositing for a week, the betting site sends a bonus, they give them a VIP manager… Depending on the bettor, they send an airline ticket to attend a football match.”

Leite’s firm was behind one of the first appeals-court rulings to hold an operator liable for addiction-related losses. In June 2026, the São Paulo Court of Justice upheld an order for Betano to repay R$61,000, half the losses run up by a bettor diagnosed with gambling addiction.

That bettor had lost more than R$122,000 on the platform. Judges found the operator failed to act on clear warning signs, and had no effective mechanism in place to curb compulsive play.

Where cases cluster

The Southeast accounts for almost half of all lawsuits, 5,076 cases, or 48.2%, followed by the Northeast at 3,092 cases (29.3%). São Paulo tops the city rankings with 908 suits, ahead of Rio de Janeiro (628) and Belo Horizonte (242).

A further 1,185 cases, 11.2% of the total, sit in Brazil’s labor courts. Eichler said most of those are conventional employment disputes brought by operators’ own staff and outsourced workers, rather than bettor complaints. Brazil currently licenses 85 companies, operating 187 brands between them, under the Betting Law.

The lawsuits arrive as Brazil’s betting industry faces pressure on several fronts at once. President Lula, who called earlier this year to shut down betting outright, has since turned the sector into a reelection talking point.

Regulators have moved to freeze unauthorized operator funds and, this month, to add tobacco-style warnings to betting ads.

Operators, for their part, are pushing back through the courts too, challenging state-level advertising restrictions even as the volume of consumer claims against them keeps climbing.

What the Predictus data makes clear is that the legal risk in Brazil now runs both ways, and the operators with the cleanest withdrawal processes and the most active duty-of-care practices are the ones best placed to avoid becoming the next case study.