Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed an emergency decree on 25 September banning online sports betting platforms, known as "bets," with immediate effect, giving users until 5 October to withdraw their balances before all betting sites and apps must go dark. At the signing ceremony in São Paulo, Lula cited the story of a mother who lost her 26-year-old son to suicide after he accumulated crippling gambling debts — a reference to Vânia de Souza Borges, a teacher from Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, whose son Rafael took his own life and who personally asked the president to outlaw the platforms when the two met earlier in September. The measure, a Medida Provisória (an executive decree valid for 120 days that must be ratified by Congress to become permanent law), also bans all betting advertising and requires football clubs to remove betting sponsors from their shirts by the same deadline — a significant step in a country where the sector had become deeply embedded in sport after a 2018 law opened the market without adequate consumer protections.