Separate data from Bet Legal and Blask show unauthorized sites proliferating and offshore search interest rising during the first week of Brazil’s betting prohibition.
Since Brazil introduced its online betting ban on Sept. 25, there has been a sharp increase in detected unauthorized domains and growing consumer search demand for offshore operators.
Some of the clearest signals come from Bet Legal, which tracks betting domains operating in Brazil, and iGaming analytics company Blask, which measures search-based consumer demand. Other monitoring systems and government enforcement data are pointing in the same direction, although none of the figures measure how much actual wagering has shifted offshore.
On Sept. 25, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a provisional measure to ban all sports betting and online casinos, which took effect immediately. Customers have until Oct. 5 to withdraw balances before licensed betting sites and apps go offline on Oct. 6. Congress must ultimately approve the measure to become permanent.
Bet Legal Shows Sharp Post-Ban Jump in Unauthorized Domains
Bet Legal data shows a sharp increase in unauthorized betting domains detected immediately after Brazil’s betting ban, followed by a leveling off at around 1,000 domains.
The monitoring platform, run by Iron Security, recorded 381 detected unauthorized domains as of the end of Sept. 25, the day the prohibition took effect. That figure rose to 726 the following day, to 799 on Sept. 27, and to 1,004 by Sept. 28. It peaked at 1,071 on Sept. 29 before easing slightly, remaining at roughly 1,000 through Oct. 2.
From Sept. 25 to the Sept. 29 peak, the detected inventory increased by approximately 181%.
Bet Legal’s methodology specifies that the figures are end-of-day inventories, not a cumulative count of newly discovered sites. Daily changes, therefore, reflect domains entering the monitored inventory minus those leaving it.
The platform separately tracks unauthorized domains that remain “on air.” That figure increased from 1,151 on Sept. 25 to 2,019 on Oct. 2, while the number of authorized domains remained at 248.
The rise in detected domains does not mean hundreds of new operators launched after the ban. Iron Security CEO and founder Diego Terrani previously told NEXT.io that, among 322 post-ban detections for which the company could establish a domain purchase date, 320 had been purchased before the prohibition and only two afterward.
To enter Bet Legal’s detected inventory, a website must be verified as offering betting and checked against Brazil’s official list of authorized operators. Affiliate pages, duplicate addresses and domains listed for sale are excluded.
The figures count web addresses rather than individual operators, and Bet Legal’s continuous unauthorized-domain monitoring only began shortly before the ban, limiting longer-term comparisons.
Offshore Search Demand More Than Triples
Blask’s data provides a different view of the same period by tracking changes in consumer demand rather than the number of available websites.
Offshore brands accounted for 3.4% of Brazil’s iGaming demand as measured by the Blask Index on Sept. 24, the day before the ban. Their share then increased every day, reaching 9.9% on Sept. 29. Blask subsequently reported that the share climbed to 11.3% on Sept. 30, the highest full-day level since Brazil’s regulated market launched in January 2025.
That represents a 7.9-percentage-point increase, with offshore operators’ share of search demand rising to more than three times its pre-ban level.
However, the figure is not a measure of offshore betting handle, revenue or player accounts. The Blask Index is a search-demand indicator built using geo-tagged data from Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, with queries filtered and normalized to identify positive consumer intent. Blask says the metric does not measure revenue, deposits or website traffic.
The increase, therefore, indicates that offshore operators are gaining a larger share of gambling-related search demand, rather than establishing that 11.3% of wagers are now being placed with illegal operators.
Blask also found a rapid contraction in Brazil’s affiliate ecosystem. The 20 most promoted brands had combined coverage across 418 affiliate sites on Sept. 29, down from 715 a week earlier, a 41.5% decline. Every brand tracked in the group lost coverage.
Bet365 saw the largest decline, falling from 60 affiliate sites to 31, while Stake became the most promoted brand despite its coverage dropping from 51 sites to 38.
Ricardo Bianco Rosada, founder of brmkt.co, expects players to move to the illegal market once licensed sites go offline on Oct. 6. “The ban does not create that market. It hands it the other 30 million customers, the ones who until now were betting on sites that could see them,” Rosada said.
Other Data Points to Expanding Illegal Market
Separate monitoring maintained by the National Association of Games and Lotteries (ANJL) has reported an even larger number of illegal domains. However, its methodology differs from Bet Legal’s, and the figures cannot be directly compared.
ANJL’s Legitbet platform reported 6,401 new illegal betting addresses between Sept. 22 and Sept. 28. Based on the daily figures released with the study, 5,610 were identified from Sept. 26 through Sept. 28, after the ban was announced. The system also identified 811 links directing consumers to illegal platforms during the full seven-day period.
ANJL represents gambling companies and has opposed the prohibition, making the source and methodology relevant when interpreting its findings.
Government data provides another measure of the size of the enforcement challenge. By Sept. 29, Brazil’s Justice and Finance ministries had requested the removal of 5,209 domains connected to unauthorized betting. Of those, the telecommunications regulator Anatel had ordered 2,387 to be blocked at the time of the announcement.
The government also reported the removal of 300 Facebook pages and 90 Instagram profiles and notified app stores over 186 betting apps, which are due to be removed on Oct. 6.
H2 Projects R$25B Offshore Shift
The first post-ban indicators are appearing alongside forecasts of a much larger eventual migration if the prohibition remains in place.
H2 Gambling Capital estimates that between R$20 billion and R$30 billion ($3.83 billion to $5.74 billion) of spending from Brazil’s former regulated market could move offshore, with approximately R$25 billion as its central estimate.
H2 based the forecast on an annualized regulated-market run rate of roughly R$40 billion before the ban. It estimates that around 60% of that spending could continue offshore, while approximately R$15 billion would leave the gambling market in the near term.
The consultancy estimates Brazil’s illegal market was already worth around R$17 billion, or around 30% of the entire Brazilian market, before the prohibition. Under H2’s central scenario, the illegal market would grow from approximately R$17 billion to R$42 billion, slightly exceeding the regulated market’s annualized run rate of roughly R$40 billion immediately before the ban.
Those figures remain projections rather than evidence of post-ban betting activity. For now, the measurable changes are occurring in domain availability and consumer search behavior.
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