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- A woman was told by the con artists that someone was sending her money to Poker.com. She doesn’t gamble.
- One con artist pretended to be from Apple; another impersonated someone from her credit union.
- Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel issued a consumer alert April 8 to warn residents about scammers using bitcoin ATMs to defraud consumers.
Stacy Hazinski received one of those annoying text messages that claimed she was about to be charged $114.02 for something she didn’t buy. So she called the number, supposedly for her Apple Pay account, to make sure that she didn’t get stuck with the bill.
She got stuck talking to scammers.
One simple phone call set off a scheme that ultimately enabled someone to steal her entire income tax refund and drain her savings account at a local credit union.
Filing her taxes early in the year essentially meant little, she told me at her Michigan condo, because now she has nothing to show for it.
She’s out $17,500 in all.
Scammers convince you to take cash to a bitcoin ATM
Her story highlights one huge red flag that consumers must watch out for these days — how scammers are convincing you to take cash to a crypto ATM at the local party store, gas station or grocery.
Con artists deceive people with backstories on how they can protect their money or avoid trouble by depositing money in a cryptocurrency ATM.
The crooks — who might pretend to be from Apple, Google, an Internet service provider or even law enforcement — do their research and know where these ATMs are in your neighborhood. They’ll tell you to withdraw cash from the bank and give you directions to one of these crypto ATMs.
The crooks even go so far as to call bitcoin ATMS “safety lockers,” according to regulators.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel issued a consumer alert April 8 to warn residents about scammers using bitcoin ATMs to defraud consumers.
“Because money sent through bitcoin ATMs is nearly impossible to recover and these machines lack oversight and regulation, they have become an attractive option for criminals engaged in fraud and money laundering,” Nessel said in a statement.
Millions of dollars lost in scams at crypto ATMs
Consumers lost $66 million to crypto ATM fraud in the first six months of 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The actual number is likely much higher as such types of fraud often go unreported, according to the FTC. The FTC said the losses involving these ATMs increased dramatically from $12 million in 2020 to $114 million for all of 2023.
People 60 and over were more than three times as likely as younger adults to report a loss using a bitcoin ATM in the first half of 2024, according to FTC data.
Once the money is deposited into bitcoin, experts warn, it is transferred quickly, making it often impossible to track. Your bank is unlikely to reimburse you because you withdrew the money on your own.
The con artists had her running scared to the ATM
Hazinski, 51, heard slew of scary stories on Feb. 28 — starting with a guy named John from Apple and switching over to a guy named Eric who claimed to be from her credit union — on how scammers were in the process of getting their hands on her federal income tax refund, as well as the rest of her savings.
As part of the scam, she was told by the guy who claimed to be an employee at the credit union that she would need to transfer her cash into a “security” account to protect her savings from someone who was about to send her money into an account at www.poker.com.
What? Why was her money going to cover some online poker tournament? She got terribly nervous, especially since her savings was limited after she had been out of work for a few months.
“And I said, ‘I don’t gamble,’ ” Hazinski recalls.
She said she wasn’t using her refund to play poker — and she wasn’t about to let someone else use her money, either.
“It was so stressful,” Hazinski said.
Scammers stayed on the phone to tell her what to do next
The fraudsters kept her on the phone most of the time, except for when they were disconnected a few times. She was told to go to a Community Choice Credit Union branch first to take out $12,500 where she remembers that the stack of bills was stuffed into zippered bag.
The crooks told her not to tell any bank employees why she was taking the money out. When a teller asked, she repeated a story the man on the phone told her. She needed money for home improvements.
She and her son and daughter live in a condo that she rents in Troy, Michigan. She had no plans for home improvements.
After she made the first withdrawal, the man on the phone told her to drive to the Community Choice Credit Union where he instructed her to take out $5,000 cash. The teller put those bills in a paper envelope.
After that, he told her that bitcoin is secure and she needed to deposit her money at a bitcoin ATM to protect it from scammers.
“So I believed him,” she told me as we talked at her dining room high-top table.
Then they told her where to deposit the money
Hazinski said the con artists told her to drive to a party store where people usually go to buy liquor or lottery tickets. Instead of winning big, she ended up losing her money on the spot.
There, she would find an ATM operated by Bitcoin Depot where she could deposit her cash.
The Bitcoin Depot ATM stands near the front register, not far from a refrigerated case that sells BB’s Buzzin Brews for $8.99 and up, ready-to-mix drinks that often include minibar size bottles of liquor.
When I visited the store April 12, I did not see any signs posted on the machine warning of potential scams. I did not attempt to buy bitcoin. The sign on the screen flashed: “Touch the screen to get started. With Bitcoin Depot there’s no hassle. Just crypto made easy.”
When I called the store April 16, I asked to speak to a manager who apparently hung up on me after I mentioned that a woman had lost $17,500 at the bitcoin machine in the store. I asked how long the ATM had been there and the phone went dead. No one picked up after I tried to immediately call again.
The party store had a decent number of customers in it that February afternoon, Hazinski remembered, but no one said a word as she pulled out the two envelopes stuffed with $17,500 from her purse.
“I was standing there at least a half hour putting money in that machine,” Hazinski said.
She had no idea how to use a bitcoin ATM or set up an account. The con artist remained on the phone to walk her through the steps.
“He’s telling me exactly what to do,” Hazinski said.
At one point, the ATM asked her for a QR code. And con artist told her: “I’ll send you the QR code.”
She scanned it. “What I find out after the fact, right, is the QR code that he sent me went to his account,” Hazinski said. “I did that twice like an idiot.”
As part of the scam, crooks text you a QR code to scan at the ATM, and once you do, the cash you deposit goes right into the bad actor’s wallet. It’s gone.
She was still in the store when her 16-year-old son Joshua, who attends high school, called her wondering why she wasn’t home yet.
“I said, ‘I’ll be home in a minute,’ ” she recalled.
When she told him what had happened, her son said “Mom, are you kidding me?”
If her bank account somehow wasn’t secure, her teen son wondered, why wouldn’t the credit union tell her to transfer it right to his account? It made no sense to go to a crypto ATM.
The lights came on, and Hazinski knew her son had to be right.
The man impersonating a credit union employee had told her earlier that someone would come to her house the next day to give her a new debit card and a new account number. No one showed up. After her conversation with her son, Hazinski didn’t expect that anyone would.
“All the bills, and you have no money,” Hazinski said.
Fortunately, her father has been able to help her cover some expenses, such as her rent.
Hazinski was laid off in August from a job as a robotics engineer, work she has done for some 25 years. Initially, she used that time off to take care of her father who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He’s now in remission and she’s still looking for work.
Hazinski has been on interviews but thinks many companies, including auto suppliers, are holding back hiring in light of the Trump tariffs. She voted for Trump and favors his strategy of raising revenue for the federal government by getting countries to pay higher tariffs. But she’s hoping that hiring picks up, too.
Like gift cards, bitcoin ATMs allow crooks to get your money fast
She’s far from the first person to be caught in this bitcoin ATM scam.
Crypto ATM abuse has gotten so bad that a top Democratic senator introduced a bill in Congress in February that would protect new customers who are most likely to be fraud victims by setting transaction limits of $2,000 per day, and $10,000 total over the first 14 days.
The Crypto ATM Fraud Protection Act — introduced by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — would require full refunds for fraudulent transactions at crypto ATMs if the new customer makes a report within 30 days.
And it would be required that the ATM offer a way for consumers to give live, verbal confirmation for any transaction greater than $500.
ATM operators would need to provide clear warnings to consumers about the risk of fraud.
In a Senate floor speech, Durbin shared the story of a man from New Lenox, Illinois, who lost $15,000 via a bitcoin ATM. That scam started when the con artists called and claimed to be a deputy in the Will County Sheriff’s Office. Supposedly, the man missed jury duty and needed to pay a fine to avoid arrest.
Durbin said it was past time to put some “commonsense guardrails in place to stop fraud in this largely unregulated industry.”
What Bitcoin Depot had to say
Bitcoin Depot, which operates the ATM along with more than 8,400 kiosks in North America, said the company remains focused on “prevention and user safety as we work to make crypto more accessible and secure.”
“We display multiple scam warnings throughout the entire transaction process and offer live customer support via phone, text, chat and email to assist users in real-time before they complete a transaction,” according to a statement sent to the Detroit Free Press by a spokesperson for Bitcoin Depot.
Bitcoin Depot also emailed photos of several types of warnings. One was of a permanent label attached below a keypad on the kiosk that stated: “Warning: Have you received a phone call from someone demanding payment in bitcoin? This is likely a scam. All bitcoin transactions are irreversible.”
I did not see such a label when I looked at the ATM on April 12.
Other warnings, according to the company, appear during the transaction. They include warnings to new customers to not use the Bitcoin Depot ATM for payments to any government entities, law enforcement, employers, tech support companies or anyone saying you’ve been hacked.
Another photo showed a warning that appears before a wallet is scanned: “Are you being scammed? Do not buy bitcoin for IRS payments, utility bills, or if someone says you have been hacked or are being investigated. These are scams.”
That warning also indicates that “losses due to fraudulent or accidental transactions may not be recoverable and transactions in virtual currency are irreversible.”
Hazinski told me she did not see any alerts about scams when the con artist on the phone was telling her what to do next.
“I did not receive any of those warnings,” she later told me by email after I sent her images of the Bitcoin Depot warnings.
I initially wrote about crooks using bitcoin ATMs to steal money roughly three years ago. A 27-year-old woman thought she snagged a great work-from-home job, but she ended up losing $500 to scammers. They sent a phony check to her Oakland Township home for her to buy Apple computer products to work remotely as an administrative assistant for a biopharmaceutical company.
But first, she somehow needed to deposit money in a bitcoin ATM to prove where she lived before they’d send any equipment. She, too, had never bought bitcoin before.
In another case in 2022, a northern Michigan couple received a phony call from “Apple Support.” Ultimately, the couple ended up withdrawing $350,000 from various banks and then turning that cash into cryptocurrency, according to the Grand Traverse Sheriff’s Department.
The man, 76, and the woman, 87, sent that money via CoinFlip platform to scammers. Some money was sent via bitcoin ATMs; the rest was through wire transfers, according to authorities.
In 2024, consumers reported losing more money to scams where they paid with bank transfers or cryptocurrency than all other payment methods combined. People reported losing $2 billion through a bank transfer and $1.42 billion through cryptocurrency, according to Federal Trade Commission data. These cryptocurrency-related scams also involved phony investments, not just cash lost at a bitcoin ATM.
Crooks, of course, take advantage of our lack of knowledge when it comes to these ATMs. Consumers need to realize that they should only send crypto to a wallet that that they control.
Once it’s in someone else’s wallet, experts say, there’s nothing you can do to recover your crypto.
The Community Choice Credit Union said it consistently shares information to alert consumers about fraud, including the use of bitcoin. Warnings about bitcoin ATM scams, according to the credit union, have been posted on its website and social media pages.
“We are extremely concerned and saddened to hear that our member was a victim of fraud,” said Jeff Dubey, vice president of Enterprise Risk Management for Community Choice Credit Union.
In a statement sent to the Free Press, the credit union said frontline credit union staff will encourage a credit union member to engage with the risk management team, if the staff suspects someone is a potential victim.
“Our internal teams are alerted to current scam techniques and trained to assist members if they indicate they have been told to withdraw money for a suspicious purpose,” according to the statement.
The credit union stated that fraudsters are increasingly tech-savvy and can “spoof” financial institution phone numbers and send text messages to take over accounts. “They also commonly employ scare tactics via phone calls, demanding that consumers purchase gift cards, wire funds or deposit cash into bitcoin machines,” the credit union stated.
Lt. Ben Hancock of the Troy Police Department said right now, scams where crooks are demanding payments by bitcoin or outright cash have seen an uptick lately.
On March 16, for example, a 61-year-old man told police that he was contacted by someone who falsely claimed to be from the Department of Justice. The man was told that his bank accounts had been breached and his money could be stolen if he did not safeguard his cash.
As part of the scam, the government imposters told him to wire transfer $33,000 to a Coinbase account. Coinbase is an online platform, which promises that you can buy and sell crypto in “less than 3 minutes.”
After transferring the money, the victim was contacted again and told he needed to transfer any remaining money he had to protect it. The man did not send any more money.
It’s another reminder, Hancock said, that scammers impersonate government agencies and brand names we trust. But no legitimate federal agency or business, he said, is going to contact you and demand that money be transferred or paid immediately by cryptocurrency, cash or other methods.
“We are still seeing some gift card scams,” Hancock said, “but currently bitcoin or other electronic payments seem to be happening more than gift card scams.”
His advice: Do not purchase bitcoin or transfer money via other means to pay a bill or handle a problem.
“Please do your research and contact whatever company these people are claiming to be from directly to confirm they are, in fact, employees,” Hancock said. “They are likely not.”
Contact personal finance columnist Susan Tompor: stompor@freepress.com. Follow her on X @tompor.