SPA mandates blocking of illegal betting accounts within 24 hours
Twenty-four hours. That is the deadline Brazilian banks and payment institutions will have to freeze an account once they receive notification from the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA). The agency's new ordinance, signed by its secretary Daniele Correa Cardoso, shifts the fight against illegal betting to where it truly hurts: the money.
The text is not limited to operators. It obliges payment institutions to establish mechanisms capable of detecting individuals and legal entities that act as intermediaries—those bridge accounts that receive, move, or transfer funds on behalf of unlicensed platforms.
To this end, it defines a catalog of warning signs. Indicators include a constant trickle of small or medium transfers, activity concentrated in specific time slots, a sudden jump in transactions, and amounts that do not align with the declared business of the recipient. There is an even more direct criterion: the text accompanying the payment, when words like "bet," "game," "bonus," "credit," "prize," "recharge," or the name of a sportsbook appear.
A separate chapter deals with those who have already been affected and seek to continue operating. The regulation mandates monitoring what happens after a block: if new accounts are opened, if the flow shifts to another person's or company's name, if Pix keys and QR codes are constantly renewed, or if a different intermediary emerges replicating the already identified behavior.
The SPA also reserved the possibility of looking beyond the financial system. A consumer complaint, an advertisement, a news article, data provided by another authority, or any reliable public record can serve to link a name to unauthorized betting operations.
Timelines have been set. Each entity has a maximum of 45 days to complete the examination of a suspicious case. If it emerges that there is unlicensed operation, or that someone is maneuvering to evade a restriction, the notification to the SPA must be sent within one business day. The specific method of sending it is pending a regulatory instruction that has not yet been published.
On the other hand, when the secretariat confirms an irregular operation, it must draw up a report detailing who the operator is, what evidence was gathered, which websites and applications they use, and in which entities they hold accounts. This document enables the blocking notification, and from its arrival, the 24-hour clock begins to freeze the balance and, in parallel, to cut off all new transactions that serve the operator, whether directly or through an intermediary. The response to both orders is due within 48 hours and must include how much money was withheld, which accounts are involved, which ones were closed, and what obstacles the bank encountered along the way. The customer must also be informed of the origin of the order.
The final destination of these funds is the most significant part of the regulation. The SPA will forward the blocked account data to the National Public Security Secretariat (Senasp) of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, and this material can fuel an administrative forfeiture process—that is, the transfer to the State of illicitly obtained resources, always with the guarantee that the holder can properly defend themselves within that procedure. The blocking notification may also include a warning about joint and several tax liability.
Adaptation has its own clock. The affected institutions will have 30 days from the publication of the regulatory instruction that governs the communication system to adjust their information submission processes. The text was published on Monday and supersedes its predecessor, Ordinance SPA/MF No. 566 of March 2025, which addressed the matter with much less precision.
The SPA is the agency of the Ministry of Finance that grants licenses and oversees the fixed-odds betting market, regulated in Brazil since January 1, 2025. The tightening of financial control comes as the president himself publicly questioned the Central Bank for not detecting massive Pix movements to sportsbooks, at a time when the weight of the illegal market is estimated at around four out of every ten reais wagered in the country.
Tags: Awards and Betting Secretariat, bank account freezing, illegal betting in Brazil, Daniele Correa Cardoso