The Brazilian president expressed his concern for citizens who use social assistance money to gamble. Payment media controls will be a key point.
Brazil.- The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he will ban online betting if regulation does not reverse the "addiction" of gamblers. These statements emerged after a report from the Central Bank about the large number of beneficiaries of the social plan Bolsa Família who use these social assistance resources for gambling.
"If regulation does not work, I will not hesitate to end (betting) definitively", he told reporters after casting his vote in the municipal elections in Sao Paulo.
Lula said it was unacceptable for low-income families receiving social security transfers through Brazil's Bolsa Familia program to spend the money on gambling. Last week, Brazil's Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA) published a list of sports betting companies licensed to operate about 200 brands of fixed-odds sports betting in what has quickly become one of the world's five largest betting markets.
The companies have to open offices in Brazil and have a local partner. According to the new regulations, the use of credit cards in betting will not be allowed. Hundreds of companies were rejected for not meeting Brazil's conditions. Still, the potential harm to family income, and mainly to the poorest families, has concerned the government and its concern increased after the Central Bank reported that R$ 3.000m (USD 550m) were spent on betting in August by beneficiaries of the Bolsa Familia program. These data were, however, dismissed by the National Association of Legal Gambling (ANJL), which claimed that the universe of beneficiaries who gamble is much smaller than reported by the Central Bank.
Lula called a cabinet meeting last Thursday, September 3 to discuss whether to ban betting for Bolsa Familia beneficiaries, but no decision was made.
As the Brazilian president has stated on more than one occasion, he is against betting, but does not seek to ban it because it will happen anyway. "Everyone knows that the person who goes to buy bread in the morning will make a small bet with the bread money," said Lula. "But what I cannot allow is for betting to become a disease, an addiction, and for people to become dependent on it, because I know people who lost their house and their car," the president concluded.
While the meeting held last week did not yield any concrete measures for the time being, the meeting ended with the commitment of the Brazilian state to advance some type of control and restriction on payment media for betting.
"Knowing that there are 190 authorized brands, Lula authorized imposing restrictions on payment media, which may include the Bolsa Família card," said the Executive Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, Dário Durigan. "It will be discussed with the companies starting next week," he added.
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The official also reiterated that blocking illegal websites starting this week will be fundamental to defining the rules of use for online games, including social program beneficiaries. The government ended up not adopting specific measures for any users, including Bolsa Família beneficiaries.
"The Bolsa Família audience is protected with the suspension of illegal betting and now with the filter that will be carried out in authorized companies," said Durigan. "For now, the use of the Bolsa Familia card has not been suspended," he remarked.
