"Hardy noticed elderly women entering the gas station with bags of cash on three separate occasions, looking anxious and usually on the phone or texting someone. Each time, they used the Bitcoin ATM, or BTM, to convert their dead presidents into crypto. Suspecting something fishy was afoot, Hardy gently prodded the old ladies. "Do you know where you're sending the money to?" Hardy would ask, per . "You don't have to be on the phone to send money, as long as you have the other person's information.""
"So Hardy resorted to drastic action: unplugging the BTM from the wall. The next week, she did the same to save a 75-year-old from losing $19,000. "It's not super, super popular, that Bitcoin machine," Hardy told , estimating that less than two dozen customers have used it for a legitimate purpose in the past year, meaning that an enormous proportion of the machine's total business is implicated in defrauding the elderly."
Cryptocurrency's decentralization and limited regulation has enabled widespread fraud, particularly targeting older adults. A Boise gas station clerk, Avalon Hardy, repeatedly intervened to stop elderly customers from using a Bitcoin ATM to send large sums of cash to scammers, unplugging the machine to prevent transfers. Hardy reports stopping seven scams and estimates few legitimate transactions at the ATM. Crypto scam revenues rose to at least $9.9 billion in 2024, a 40 percent increase from the prior year, according to Chainalysis. An FBI report from 2023 found older adults were the most vulnerable to crypto fraud.
Read at Futurism
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