Brazil's Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal) and the Federal Prosecutor's Office (MPF) launched Operation Jogo de Sombras (Shadow Game) on Friday (28), serving six search and seizure warrants in João Pessoa (Paraíba), Recife (Pernambuco) and São Paulo. The target is a business group behind a fixed-odds sports betting platform, known in Brazil as a bet, that allegedly moved more than R$ 5 billion in 2025 alone, according to both agencies. Investigators are examining suspected tax evasion, illegal remittance of funds abroad and money laundering.
The operation is run by the MPF's special task force against organized crime (Gaeco) and involved 28 Revenue Service staff, including tax auditors and analysts, plus ten federal prosecutors, the agency said in a statement. As of Friday morning, the name of the company under investigation and the targets of the warrants, which are limited to search and seizure, had not been disclosed. Details were expected at a press conference at the Finance Ministry in Brasília.
Following the money
According to the investigation, the group set up a shell company in Curaçao, in the Caribbean, to pretend the platform operated outside Brazil before the sector was regulated. Investigators argue, however, that Brazilian companies linked to the group were the ones actually running the operation in the country. Part of the funds was allegedly sent abroad and later returned as payments for services, a mechanism that could be used to justify the repatriation of money previously moved out of Brazil. The probe also found signs of pooled accounts held at fintechs, which concentrate money from different clients in a single account and make it harder to trace the final beneficiaries.
The suspicions do not stop at the pre-regulation period. The Revenue Service says the group obtained a license to operate starting in 2025, but investigators are checking whether the money used to pay the license fee came from the earlier irregular activity. After the new rules took effect, part of the structures was allegedly adapted to keep evading taxes, including declaring supposedly fictitious expenses to the tax authority to reduce taxes owed from the 2025 calendar year on.
Alongside the warrants, the Revenue Service opened 11 tax procedures, with a potential recovery of about R$ 300 million for public coffers, the agency said. The group's domestic and international financial flows will remain under analysis to identify possible unreported revenue and the ultimate beneficiaries of the operations.
This is the second major joint operation against the betting market in August. On the 13th, Operation Arena served 17 search and seizure warrants in five states, with a court order to seize assets and funds of up to R$ 1 billion. For companies that paid the license fee and started collecting taxes under the new rules, competition from operators that, according to investigators, hid revenue abroad distorted the market. For the Treasury, which expects to recover R$ 300 million in this case alone, and for bettors, whose money moved through opaque structures, the agencies' message is that oversight of the sector is here to stay.