The Bitcoin ATM is never the scam. The phone call is.

According to ESET, crypto ATM scams follow a script so consistent that the machine itself is almost beside the point. The FBI recorded 13,460 of these scams in 2025, netting fraudsters $389 million, a 23% rise in volume and a 58% rise in losses over 2024. Most complaints came from people over 50, who lost more than $302m between them, with victims over 60 accounting for $257.4m of that total.

The pattern behind those numbers is worth setting out plainly, because it shows where the fraud actually happens. A phone call arrives out of nowhere. The caller sounds official: a police officer, a government employee, sometimes a bank representative. They say a bank account has been compromised, or an identity is being used for crime, or a computer is infected. The fear is the point. It is designed to stop a person from thinking clearly and, more specifically, from hanging up and calling someone else.

The call does the work; the machine just moves the money

Once someone is frightened and on the line, the caller keeps them there. They discourage contact with friends, family or real authorities. Then comes the instruction: withdraw cash from the bank, go to a specific Bitcoin or crypto ATM, deposit the cash, and buy crypto with it. Often a QR code arrives by text. Scanning it tells the ATM to send the funds straight to a wallet the criminal controls.

This is the observation the numbers point to but do not state outright: the ATM never needed to be scanned or watched for anything, because by the time a person is standing in front of one, the fraud has already succeeded over the phone. The transaction at the machine is just the payout step. No real government agency, bank or company will ever ask for payment through a crypto ATM. Once the deposit happens, ESET notes that recovery is very unlikely: crypto transactions have no chargeback facility, and while transaction flows can be traced, the person holding the wallet can stay anonymous.

That is precisely why the useful moment to interrupt this scam is not at the machine but earlier, in the call itself. A sequence like this, an unsolicited call, escalating fear, urgency to move money, and a demand to use a specific payment channel, is a pattern that can be flagged before cash ever leaves someone's hand. Recognizing that structure, rather than waiting for a crypto ATM to be involved, is the kind of pattern automated scam-detection tools are built to catch early, which is the sort of signal Flggd watches for.

Older adults are disproportionately targeted partly because fewer of them are familiar with what a crypto ATM even is, which makes the unfamiliar machine feel like part of the official process rather than a red flag. Anyone who gets an unsolicited call demanding a Bitcoin ATM payment, no matter how serious the claim sounds, should hang up immediately.