Coaches publish bets and teach how to circumvent Lula's veto, and clients complain about scams

Coaches who offer betting suggestions accompanied by promises of winnings, called tipsters on social media, started teaching how to circumvent the government's veto on betting since September 25th.

The report followed ten Telegram and Discord groups last week, some of which were easily located on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) through searches for the term "tipster", and followed the tactics of these coaches to profit from bettors. He also saw how players take risks such as trading in cryptocurrencies and transferring to unknown people and companies in order to register a guess.

Links to conversation channels, which can bring together hundreds of thousands of people (the largest group seen by the report had 26,589 members), appear prominently in the description of profiles with more than 100 thousand followers. The oldest of the Telegram groups dates back to 2022 and is still online.

In some cases, tipsters themselves started to organize rounds of predictions on sporting events and even on Brazilian presidential elections. Some customers also complain about defaults on platforms like X and Discord.

Complaints against influencer Diogo Pólvora, for example, have accumulated more than a thousand likes on Elon Musk's social network. Pólvora is known by the nickname MD Tips and organized a lottery to determine who would win the second round of the dispute for Palácio do Planalto.

Until October 31st, game participants complained, in 15 publications on X, that the tipster did not pay the prizes and stopped responding to messages.

Pólvora offered a payment of six times the bet amount in case of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) victory. The amount raised would be allocated to Polymarket, a platform that accepts predictions on any topic and which has been banned in Brazil since April.

The risk reward offered by the influencer exceeded Polymarket's calculations, which measured Lula's chance of winning always above 12% (the reference value needed for a six-fold bonus on the prize).

When contacted for the report by email, the telephone number of the companies of which he is registered as the owner and messages on X, Pólvora did not respond. On November 1, he stated, in a note published on social media, that he used his own resources to return "all amounts originally deposited by participants".

According to the statement, the transfers were not made due to a breach of contract with an unspecified supplier. After the episode, he changed his nickname on social media to MD Sem Tips. On X alone, Pólvora's profile has 165 thousand followers.

The offer of sports predictions was prohibited by a provisional measure signed by Lula and is considered a crime against the consumer, with a penalty of up to one year in prison. The government is trying to approve a bill to criminalize the activity and impose imprisonment of up to six years for betting intermediaries.

Payment intermediation, as in the case of Pólvora, is not a rule. In Telegram groups such as ESoccer Global, Clube GetUP and AutoBots Pybots, administrators indicate betting sites that are still online in Brazil.

The American website 1win.com, for example, accepts payments with USDT, a dollar-anchored cryptocurrency popular in Brazil and integrated into Pix by payment institutions. To give credibility to the portal, the administrator of ESoccer Global remembers that the fighter Jon Jones, former UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) heavyweight champion, sponsors this bet.

"I decided to put together a list of current houses, reinforcing that these houses are currently not regulated, it is not advertising and I am not responsible", states the channel administrator.

Other channels, such as Layback and Sharktool, on Discord, and Arkeiros Trading, on Telegram, offer software that allows betting on the British portal Betfair (from the same conglomerate as the Brazilian BetNacional, currently under restriction) and on the predictive market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket.

On the channels, there are complaints from players who lost money when trying to make deposits at Polymarket, where payments are made with cryptocurrencies. One of Layback's administrators said that Polymarket has several pages of instructions to prevent errors that could lead to irreversible losses.

In a statement, Flutter, a multinational listed on the New York Stock Exchange that controls Betfair, claims to maintain a partnership with SharkTool, independent software focused on sports trading — a betting modality prohibited in Brazil in which prize prices are defined by competitors' predictions.

One of the Telegram groups covered by the report, 9.Felipe Free, was taken down by the app on Thursday (5) for violating the technology company's terms of use.

The messaging app was contacted by the report through its channel dedicated to the press on Thursday afternoon, but did not respond. Contacted by email on the same day, X and Discord did not comment either. Meta, owner of Instagram, states that it works to comply with government regulations.

According to a report from Sedigi (Secretariat for Digital Rights), obtained through the Access to Information Law, the social media conglomerate has restricted at least 840 URLs in response to requests from authorities since the publication of the provisional measure that vetoed online betting. The company also removed 590 pages on its own.

According to the same report, Discord and X did not present consolidated data on the measures taken against profiles and channels that publish illegal bets.

Sedigi, linked to the Ministry of Justice, searches the internet and social networks to identify illegal bets. According to the ministry, the Cyber ​​Operations Laboratory located 2,898 websites, around 700 profiles on TikTok and Instagram, 1,295 groups on Telegram and a server on Discord that promoted clandestine games.

TikTok, which claims to have always banned gambling advertising, informed the government of the removal of 27,882 ads between September 25 and October 3 — 450 removals were at the government's request.

According to a statement from the Treasury, the Prizes and Betting Secretariat has blocked more than 126,000 illegal websites since the start of inspection in 2024. The secretariat also identifies the payment methods accepted by these websites and orders the blocking of the financial accounts used in the operation.