Brazilian Lula Targets Online Bets as Poor Households Bleed Quietly

At a public investment event near São Paulo, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned that betting apps have turned phones into home casinos. His government is tightening rules and taxes, while courts debate limits and families feel the loss.

The Casino in the Living Room

In Mauá, in the São Paulo metropolitan region, microphones and official banners were set up to announce public investments in education and health. Yet the image Lula da Silva chose was not of a classroom or a clinic. It was a living room, lit by the glow of a cellphone screen, with the casino now inside the house.

The sensory detail in his warning was the device’s smallness, how it fits in a palm, how it can slide from a parent’s hand into a child’s. “The casino is in your living rooms, in the palm of your fourteen-year-old children, who take your cellphones and play, many times spending money you do not have,” Lula said, according to EFE. He delivered it as a moral complaint and a policy argument at once, and with an unmistakably electoral cadence as he prepares to seek reelection in October.

What this does is reframe an abstract market story into a domestic one. Online betting is not only advertising during sports broadcasts, but also an industry category and a new tax base. It is a pocket-sized habit that can travel through a household faster than any public service can.

Lula’s core claim was blunt and aimed downward at the social pyramid. “And we are going to take very serious measures against those bets because they are taking the money of the poor people of the country,” he said, according to EFE. The memorable line, the one that sticks like dust in your throat, is the implication that poverty is not only a lack of income but a lack of defenses against a product designed to be irresistible.

Taxes, Restrictions, and a Fast-Moving Market

Lula also framed his opposition in personal and cultural terms, saying he learned to be against games of chance through Catholic teaching, but arguing that something has changed with mass cellphone use. The trouble is that moral language does not regulate an app store, and nostalgia does not compete with the dopamine economics of a betting interface.

His government, in power since January 1, 2023, has already moved on the policy side. A bill promoted by the administration and approved by Parliament raises a tax on revenue for digital betting houses, applied to companies’ gross revenue. The rate, according to the notes, rises from 12% to 13% in 2026, 14% in 2027, and 15% in 2028, with a portion earmarked for actions related to health and social security.

That targeted tax sits alongside other levies, and the notes say the total tax burden could reach around forty percent according to various estimates. In practice, the government is trying to treat betting like a lucrative vice that must help fund the social damage it can accelerate, even as it remains visible and normalized during sports programming.

The market’s direction, however, is not subtle. Data from Grand View Research’s notes projects that the online gambling market in Latin America will reach US$ 10,407.1 million by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 11.9% from 2025 to 2030, with sports betting the largest revenue-generating segment in 2024 and expected to be the fastest-growing. In that framing, Brazil is not simply regulating a nuisance. It is sitting at the center of a regional boom.

The wager here is that taxation and restrictions can slow the expansion without pushing the behavior deeper into the shadows or turning enforcement into another arena where the poor are policed more than protected. Latin America knows this dilemma well: states often regulate late, after a product has already colonized daily life, and then struggle to build guardrails that do not collapse onto the same households they claim to defend.

Bolsa Familia, Courts, and the Money Trail

One of the government’s most direct moves came in a regulation published in October that barred beneficiaries of Bolsa Familia and recipients of other social initiatives from placing online bets. It was an attempt to keep subsidized money from flowing straight into private platforms, a boundary line drawn around the flagship program that anchors Lula’s social policy identity.

That line did not hold cleanly. Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fux later limited the measure’s reach at the request of the National Association of Games and Lotteries. A conciliation hearing at the high court had been scheduled for Tuesday, involving all parties. Still, it was canceled for scheduling reasons, leaving the dispute unresolved in the institutional space where Brazil often negotiates policy by judicial refinement.

Then there is the data that makes the argument feel less rhetorical. Central Bank figures cited in the notes showed that, in a single month, Bolsa Familia beneficiaries made transfers of up to 3.0 billion reais to betting companies, a figure presented alongside equivalents in dollars and euros. Even without adding anything beyond that number, the everyday observation writes itself. When money is tight, the outflow is louder than the inflow, and the household budget becomes a battlefield of small decisions.

Lula’s framing in Mauá leaned heavily on children and phones, and it is easy to see why. A teenager with access to a parent’s device is not only a family issue but a governance problem, because it turns regulation into a question of enforcement inside private life. It also turns the politics of gambling into the politics of dignity, the same terrain where Bolsa Familia has always operated.

Brazil’s debate is not taking place in a vacuum. Across Latin America, smartphones are the infrastructure of daily survival, connecting people to work, banking, school communication, and public services that can be unreliable or distant. When betting platforms rely on the same infrastructure, the state is forced into an awkward position: warning citizens about a product delivered through the very tool they need to navigate modern life.

Lula promised “very serious” measures, and he placed them inside the emotional geography of the home. The trouble is that the home is where the market now lives too, in the same pocket where a family keeps its last bit of cash, its messages, its hopes, and, increasingly, its risk.

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