.svg)
Brazil’s chief gambling regulator expects to establish a registration system for suppliers and has pledged to work with international authorities to shut out the black market.
Less than a month into Brazil’s regulated online gambling market, the head of the country’s Secretariat for Prizes and Bets (SPA), Regis Dudena, is already facing calls from his licence holders to crack down on those operators that chose to remain offshore.
Facing a packed room of interested onlookers during a roundtable session at ICE in Barcelona this week, Dudena was asked whether he would join other international regulators in increasing pressure on suppliers that sell to both licensed and unlicensed operators.
“More and more it’s necessary to have such registration in relation to B2B,” he said. “I am very convinced we need to push a bit more with this idea.”
“We are going to start thinking about online games, systems and other providers,” said Dudena. “I don’t think we are going to do licences, but some kind of certification.”
He added that the SPA is already working with social media companies to try and limit the ability for black-market operators to advertise in Brazil.
“We are trying to have some sort of fast-track with Meta, Google, TikTok and the others,” he said, adding that Brazilian authorities have also moved to block thousands of domains associated with illegal operators since the market opened.
The regulator is also intensifying its collaboration with international regulators, in particular to help identify bad actors that may be common across multiple markets.
Ahead of the roundtable, Dudena said he had met with the UK Gambling Commission at ICE to “share information”.
“We know that it’s important to learn from the mistakes of others,” he said.
With examples of international new markets clearly in mind, operators asked if tighter advertising restrictions were likely to follow the wave of gambling marketing that inevitably follows a new market opening, as newly licensed operators compete for market share.
Regulations on advertising are already coming under focus in Brazil, with that area one specific line of inquiry of a special commission formed in Brazil's Senate to investigate the industry.
Dudena said he would not be surprised to see tougher advertising rules in the future, “but I think we need to wait a little bit of time” to understand the true effects of gambling marketing on the general public.
He said he opposes bills that have been presented in Brazil's Congress that would ban advertising completely.
“I don’t see these as a good way to deal with the market,” he said.
Dudena said he would also consider introducing a centralised self-exclusion system in the future, but expected there would be concerns about the personal data of gamblers which would need to be surmounted first.
Before tackling these problems, however, the regulator still has hundreds of licence applications to process, with more than 300 companies having applied in total and only 70 issued so far.
