The FBI’s latest figures on cryptocurrency kiosk fraud are not subtle. U.S. residents lost $388 million through crypto ATMs in 2025, a 58% jump in losses from the year before, across more than 13,400 complaints. The money is gone, the machines are still running in gas stations and grocery stores across the country, and the people losing the most are overwhelmingly over 50.
How the Scam Actually Works
The mechanics are not complicated, which is part of why they keep working. A fraudster contacts a victim, usually through a fake investment pitch, a tech support ruse, or a romance scam, and convinces them they need to move money quickly. They are told exactly where to find a nearby crypto ATM, how to withdraw cash from their bank account, and how to feed it into the machine. The funds land in a wallet the victim will never see again.
The FBI noted that in most complaints, victims received detailed step-by-step instructions from the people defrauding them. The specificity is deliberate. Someone who has never used a crypto ATM and is already stressed about whatever story they have been told needs hand-holding through the process, and the people running these operations provide it.
Most of these schemes trace back to criminal compounds in Southeast Asia, predominantly run by Chinese gangs, according to U.S. Treasury Department assessments. The operations are sophisticated, staffed, and specifically designed to exploit the gap between how quickly crypto transactions settle and how slowly fraud victims realize what happened.
The State-by-State Picture
Texas led all states with 1,179 reports and nearly $57 million in losses. Florida followed with 1,213 reports and $32.7 million. California and Illinois both crossed $20 million. Arizona, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio all recorded eight-figure losses.
The geographic spread matters because it undercuts any argument that this is a regional or demographic niche problem. These are large, economically diverse states with very different populations, and the losses are substantial across all of them.
More than half of all complaints involved people over 50, who accounted for over $302 million of the total $388 million lost. That concentration is not accidental. Older adults are specifically targeted by the romance and tech support scam variants that funnel most victims toward crypto ATMs, partly because they are more likely to have accessible savings and partly because they are less likely to have prior experience with cryptocurrency that would make the instructions seem unusual.
The Legal and Legislative Response
The industry is facing pressure from multiple directions simultaneously, and some of it is moving quickly. Tennessee banned cryptocurrency ATMs outright last month. Indiana did the same in March. Minnesota’s Senate has passed similar legislation, and it is waiting on a House vote. These are not incremental regulations around transaction limits or reporting requirements. They are outright prohibitions, which reflect how state legislators are reading the data on legitimate versus fraudulent use.
The lawsuits tell a similar story. Massachusetts sued Bitcoin Depot, the largest global kiosk operator, in February. The attorney general’s office contacted hundreds of the company’s customers and found that more than 80% had been victims of scams. Iowa has sued both Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip, alleging the companies profited from fraud. Washington D.C. sued kiosk operator Athena in September, claiming 93% of its transactions in the district were scam-related.
Those figures, 80% and 93%, are not rounding errors. They are the central question now being asked about whether crypto ATMs, as currently deployed, serve any meaningful legitimate purpose that outweighs the documented harm.
What Other Countries Have Done
New Zealand banned all crypto ATMs last year. Australia has introduced legislation targeting spending limits and other fraud-reduction measures. The U.S. response has been more fragmented, left largely to individual states and local prosecutors, while federal agencies have mostly issued warnings and published data.
The Treasury Department flagged crypto ATMs as an increasingly significant vector for cyber theft losses last year. The FBI’s new figures confirm the trajectory. Whether that leads to federal action or continues as a state-by-state patchwork is an open question, though the pace at which state bans are accumulating suggests the legislative momentum is building regardless of what happens at the federal level.
A Number Worth Sitting With
$388 million in a single year, from a payment method that requires victims to physically travel to a machine, withdraw cash, and manually feed it in, is a figure that says something uncomfortable about how effectively these scams manipulate the people they target. This is not a frictionless digital transfer that happens before anyone notices. Victims are making multiple deliberate steps, often over the course of hours, while someone on the phone talks them through it.
The fraud works because the social engineering works. The ATM is just where the money leaves.
Research and Intelligence Sources: FBI, U.S. Treasury Department, Therecord, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, AARP, Iowaattorneygeneral, Office of the Attorney General (District Columbia)
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