Arizona’s Crypto ATM Refunds Total $171,332 for 35 Victims, Against a $177M Problem

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Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said her office helped 35 victims of cryptocurrency ATM fraud recover full refunds totaling $171,332 since a state law requiring those refunds took effect on September 26, 2025. Mayes announced the total on August 12, 2026, and urged victims who haven’t yet come forward to file a complaint before their own 30-day window closes.

The 30-Day Window and the Limits Behind It

The law, Arizona’s Cryptocurrency Kiosk License Fraud Prevention Act (A.R.S. Section 6-1236), gives fraud victims 30 days from the date of a transaction to report the scam to both the kiosk operator and law enforcement. Miss that window and the guaranteed refund disappears. The statute also splits kiosk customers into two tiers. Anyone who has used a given operator for less than 10 days is capped at $2,000 in transactions per day. Customers past that 10-day mark can move up to $10,500 daily across every kiosk operator in the state.

Those limits exist because of how the scams actually play out. Phoenix police stopped a woman after she deposited $16,000 into a kiosk at an AM/PM gas station while a caller posing as PayPal walked her through the transaction. In Scottsdale, a man posing as an Uber driver stole $223,000 in cryptocurrency from multiple hotel guests. In Peoria, one victim stood at a single machine for two and a half hours, feeding it hundreds of dollars in cash at a time, and lost $30,000 before anyone intervened. Peoria police have said residents there lost $27 million to crypto scams over two years. Detective Mike Finney, describing how fast the money moves once it is converted, called it “the Wild West.” The number of machines those scams run through has grown quickly: Arizona had 17 crypto ATMs a few years ago and has close to 600 now.

Those daily limits also changed twice while the bill was being drafted. Legislative filings show Arizona House Bill 2387, introduced by Rep. David Marshall Sr. in January 2025, applied a single $1,000 daily cap to every customer before lawmakers split it into the tiered structure that eventually became law.

$171,332 Against a $177 Million Problem

Whether $171,332 in refunds moves the needle on Arizona’s crypto ATM problem is a separate question from whether the refund process itself works. Mayes’s office has said Arizonans lost more than $177 million to these scams in 2024, the year before the refund law existed, and that more than two-thirds of the state’s crypto ATM fraud victims were over 60. The $171,332 and the $177 million are not measuring the same thing: one is a single year’s total losses before the law existed, the other is money returned to victims who reported in time under a law that has been active for less than a year. Judging the statute by that comparison alone would overstate what it was built to do. It exists to make individual victims whole after a scam, not to shrink the total amount criminals take from the state.

Mayes herself has suggested that second job is not finished. In earlier remarks about the transaction limits, made before the August refund announcement, she said:

“I don’t think we’re done with this… the limit is still too high.”

That is the same official who, weeks later, pointed to the refund total as evidence the law is working.

Arizona Chose Refunds. Other States Chose Bans and Lawsuits.

Other states have decided a refund-and-limit model is not the answer at all. Minnesota’s ban on crypto ATMs took effect August 1, 2026, after Minnesota officials cited nearly $1 million in reported losses to kiosk scams targeting seniors. Indiana and Tennessee have already moved to enforce bans of their own, and Delaware and New Jersey are pushing in the same direction: Delaware’s House Bill 441 would force operators to remove their machines within 90 days, and a companion bill in New Jersey cleared committee in June 2026. In Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued kiosk operator Athena Bitcoin in September 2025, alleging that 93% of the deposits made at its D.C. machines over a five-month stretch traced back to scams, with a median victim age of 71, a maximum single-victim loss of $98,000 across 19 transactions, and fees as high as 26% against an industry norm of 0.24% to 3%. The lawsuit also alleges Athena refused refunds even to customers it knew had been scammed, including the fees. Arizona chose regulation paired with mandatory refunds. Washington chose litigation against a specific operator. Minnesota chose to remove the machines. At the federal level, the Stop Crypto ATM Scams Act, introduced by Reps. Sean Casten and María Elvira Salazar, would push Arizona’s basic model nationwide: daily transaction caps and mandatory scam warnings instead of an outright ban.

The 35 people Arizona’s law has already helped are real, and so is the $171,332 they got back. But the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded more than 13,000 complaints tied to kiosk and QR-code fraud nationally in 2025, totaling $389 million in losses, a 58% increase over the year before. Victims 60 and older accounted for more than $257 million of that total. The number of people who might need Arizona’s refund process next year is growing faster than the program’s track record so far suggests it can keep up with.