There are images that say more about Portugal than any statistical report.
One of them is repeated daily in stationery stores and kiosks from the north to the south of the country: an elderly man, with shaking hands, counting coins to buy a scratch card. Another, quieter, but equally revealing: an elderly person, alone at home, calling a paid television program that promises immediate prizes, while calculating whether the pension will last until the end of the month.
These images are no curious exceptions. These are signs of a country where hope has been converted into business — and where this transformation falls with particular intensity on those who have fewer resources, less protection and fewer alternatives.
Jurist
Para muitos idosos, jogos como o Euromilhões ou as raspadinhas, bem como concursos televisivos baseados em chamadas pagas, tornam-se rotina
It’s not just about entertainment. For many elderly people, games such as Euromillions or scratch cards, as well as paid call-in television contests, become routine. Not just because of the remote promise of gain, but because they fill a more immediate void: that of loneliness, the repetition of days and the absence of regular human contact.
The scratch card is not a simple game. It is a carefully explored emotional anticipation mechanism. An instant of expectation sold to those who, often, have already lost almost everything else in terms of social expectations.
And this is where the problem stops being individual.
Portugal maintains persistent levels of poverty among the elderly population. Many pensions are not enough to meet the real cost of living. In this context, the promise of a sudden change of destiny stops being an innocent fantasy and starts to function as a symbolic substitute for non-existent social mobility.
There is no need for explicit deception for exploitation to occur. All it takes is the existence of a structural imbalance: products designed to maximize repetition, stimulation and adherence, placed in a market where a significant part of consumers live with minimal economic margins.
Scratch cards are ubiquitous, standardized, integrated into everyday life. Television contests feed on emotional urgency, easy-win language and the permanent promise of immediate reward. All of this is legal, all of this is publicly visible — and that is precisely why its effectiveness is so relevant.
What is at stake is not individual freedom to play or participate. What is at stake is how this freedom is systematically captured in a context of vulnerability. When successive small losses have a real impact on the monthly budget, the game is no longer neutral. It becomes regressive.
There is an asymmetry that is difficult to ignore here: on the one hand, systems designed to maximize participation and recurring revenue; on the other, people for whom the promise of an unlikely gain often represents the only escape narrative available.
There is no need to caricature intentions to recognize the result. There may be no direct individual malice. But there is a model that works because it finds weaknesses — and consistently exploits them.
And this must be said clearly: when hope becomes a product systematically sold to those who can least bear the loss, we are not just dealing with entertainment. We are facing a standardized way of extracting value from vulnerability.
The problem is not moralizing those who play. The problem is accepting without enough discomfort a system that structurally depends on the most fragile continuing to fulfill its promise.
And it is in this imbalance — between promise and fragility, between stimulus and limitation — that it becomes difficult to avoid the essential conclusion: when hope is transformed into a product systematically targeted at those who have the least margin to lose, the problem is no longer just individual. It’s structural.
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