Losses were the highest among U.S. states, fueling calls from prosecutors, sheriffs and cities for tighter rules or outright bans on crypto ATM-like machines.
Texas residents lost $56.8 million through cryptocurrency kiosk scams last year, with about 1,200 victims, the highest total among states based on FBI complaint data and roughly double Florida’s losses. The machines, often placed in gas stations, grocery stores and convenience stores, let users insert cash and quickly send cryptocurrency to a wallet address, a speed that investigators say helps fraudsters move funds across multiple wallets and mix them with other money before recovery efforts can begin. The Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center said victims generally have only 36 to 48 hours to recover any funds, and clawbacks are rare. The scams typically rely on impersonation, with callers posing as police officers, court officials or utility companies and pressuring targets to pay alleged fines or missed obligations while staying on the phone as victims drive to a kiosk. In one case cited by the Tribune, a fake Travis County officer told a 72-year-old Austin woman named Maria she would be arrested and sent her court papers containing a real case number and her home address. She refused to deposit cash after realizing the machine was a Bitcoin machine, but other victims were less fortunate, including one who lost nearly $100,000 and another who lost $63,000. Texas does not license or monitor the kiosks, a gap that law enforcement advocates say scammers exploit. Adam Colby, who runs the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center, told a Texas House committee in May that the machines “do not do anything useful, and no sane person would choose to use them except to hide illegal funds.” Enforcement efforts have at times escalated into seizures. Sheriff Chuck Havard used a power tool on a Bitcoin Depot kiosk in Jasper County in June 2025 after a family reported losing $25,000, and the machine returned about $32,000 to his office. Bitcoin Depot later sued the county and settled after a similar seizure in McLennan County in 2023, where an 82-year-old woman had lost $15,000. Cities are starting to act while the state debate continues. San Antonio recorded about $39 million in losses across 660 reports from January 2024 to April 2026 and began requiring bilingual English and Spanish warning signs at its 193 kiosks on July 1; operators that fail to post notices face fines of $100 to $500 per machine per day. Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith is pressing lawmakers for a statewide ban after an elderly woman lost $13,000 to an inmate operating the scam from a Georgia prison. Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota have already banned the machines statewide. Bitcoin Depot, which had more than 9,000 kiosks across North America, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May after first-quarter 2026 revenue fell about 50% from a year earlier, and the Massachusetts attorney general sued the company in February.