CFTC Warns of Rising Crypto ATM Fraud as Losses Hit $388 Million in 2025

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is telling Americans to slow down before using a crypto ATM. In an advisory titled “Pause Before You Pay”, the agency says anyone instructing a person to move money through one of these machines is very likely running a scam. The warning follows FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data showing $388,981,267 lost to crypto-kiosk fraud in 2025, a 58% jump from the year before, spread across 13,460 complaints.

Why it matters

Crypto ATMs work like ordinary cash machines but do the opposite of what a bank does. Cash fed into one is converted straight into cryptocurrency and sent to a wallet the sender does not control, and the transfer usually cannot be undone once it clears. The CFTC’s own advisory puts it plainly:

“No government agency, legitimate financial institution, or reputable company will instruct you to move money using crypto ATMs, gift cards, or couriers.”

Adults over 50 bore more than half of 2025’s complaints and over $302 million of the losses, and a separate FinCEN notice found people 60 and older were more than three times as likely as younger adults to report a kiosk loss.

The bigger pattern

The FBI’s 2025 total is not an isolated spike. FTC data shows crypto-ATM losses climbed nearly tenfold from 2020 to over $110 million in 2023, then to $246.7 million in 2024, according to a FinCEN notice issued that August. What has not kept pace is the machines themselves: FinCEN’s own kiosk count rose from 4,128 in January 2019 to 37,342 by January 2025, about ninefold. Losses over almost the same stretch rose roughly 32-fold. The fraud is scaling faster than the hardware carrying it. Congress has already tried a narrower fix: the proposed Stop Crypto ATM Scams Act, unveiled in June, would cap new users at $2,000 a day, but the bill has not passed.

States are moving faster than Washington

That gap helps explain why state governments have stopped waiting on federal advisories. Hawaii’s new law bars cash deposits into crypto ATMs starting October 1, making it the first state to do so; the FBI logged $3.85 million in Hawaii kiosk losses in 2025, nearly four times 2024’s total.

“It usually starts with some unsolicited phone call, text message or email,” Hawaii Banking Commissioner Dwight Young said, describing how scammers open contact before directing victims to a kiosk.

Tennessee, Minnesota, Indiana and Georgia have each imposed their own crypto-ATM restrictions over the past two years. But banning the kiosk does not touch what feeds it: the exchanges supplying bitcoin to ATM operators sit outside state jurisdiction, so machines can simply relocate to a state that has not yet banned them.

Not every state has picked a ban. Arizona chose refunds and daily transaction caps instead. Its refund program has returned $171,332 to 35 victims in under a year, a fraction of the $177 million Arizonans lost to kiosk fraud in 2024 alone.

For now, the CFTC’s advice is the simplest tool available: treat any unsolicited call, text or email that ends with instructions to visit a crypto ATM as a red flag, hang up, and verify independently before sending anything.