Scammers posing as federal marshals and court officers directed victims to cryptocurrency kiosks and stole more than $388 million in 2025, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The IC3 logged over 13,400 complaints tied to those machines, a 23 percent increase from 2024, with dollar losses jumping 58 percent year over year. No legitimate court, law enforcement agency, or government body has ever required anyone to pay a fine or settle a legal matter through Bitcoin.
Why $388 million in kiosk losses keeps climbing
The speed of cryptocurrency kiosks is the core problem. A victim walks into a convenience store or gas station, feeds cash into a machine, scans a QR code, and the funds convert into an irreversible crypto transfer within minutes. The IC3’s 2026 bulletin shows that complaints rose from roughly 10,900 in 2024 to more than 13,400 in 2025, while reported losses climbed from about $246 million to over $388 million. That 58 percent spike in dollar losses far outpaced the 23 percent rise in complaint volume, meaning each individual victim lost more on average than the year before.
Older adults bear a disproportionate share of the damage. FTC data drawn from the Consumer Sentinel Network, a database of consumer-submitted fraud reports rather than confirmed criminal cases, show that older victims tend to report the highest median losses per incident. The pattern holds because the scam scripts exploit urgency and authority: callers claim to be marshals, threaten arrest, and keep the victim on the phone while the deposit goes through.
The trend is not new. In a prior IC3 advisory from 2021, federal officials warned that criminals were steering victims toward both cryptocurrency ATMs and online exchanges, emphasizing that once funds move into a scammer’s wallet there is usually no chargeback mechanism. The latest figures suggest that, despite years of outreach, criminals have refined their scripts and are successfully extracting larger payments from each target.
How the scam works and who has warned against it
The playbook is consistent across thousands of complaints. A caller tells the target there is an outstanding warrant, an unpaid tax bill, or a missed jury duty obligation. The caller then instructs the victim to visit a nearby crypto kiosk, insert cash, and scan a QR code that auto-populates a wallet address controlled by the scammer. Throughout the transaction, the caller stays on the line to prevent the victim from seeking outside advice or hanging up.
Scammers often spoof caller ID to display the name of a local court, police department, or federal agency. Some send forged documents by email or text, complete with seals and signatures, to make the threat look official. Others layer in personal details scraped from data breaches or social media to convince the victim that law enforcement already “knows everything” and that immediate payment is the only way to avoid arrest.
The U.S. Marshals Service has stressed that it “will never ask people to make bitcoin deposits,” and that its officers do not call private citizens to demand payment or personal financial information. That language is specific and unambiguous: any phone call demanding cryptocurrency payment on behalf of a court or federal agency is fraudulent. FinCEN has separately flagged convertible virtual currency kiosks as high-risk points for scam proceeds and reminded kiosk operators of their Bank Secrecy Act reporting duties, including suspicious activity reports when transactions match known fraud typologies.
Missing data on kiosk density, enforcement, and recovery
The IC3 provides a state-by-state complaint breakout, but it does not publish per-state loss totals or demographic detail beyond national aggregates. That gap makes it difficult to test whether states with the densest kiosk networks per capita are producing complaint growth rates above the 23 percent national average. Licensing and registration data for kiosk operators sit with state regulators and FinCEN, and no public cross-reference with IC3 filings exists. Until those datasets are linked, policymakers and local law enforcement will have to rely on anecdotal patterns and individual case files instead of a comprehensive national map of risk.
Enforcement outcomes are similarly opaque. Public IC3 summaries focus on complaint counts and dollar losses, not on how many cases lead to arrests, indictments, or asset seizures. Because many scams involve overseas actors and rapid layering of funds across multiple wallets and exchanges, investigators often struggle to freeze assets before they are moved or mixed. Victims who file complaints are typically advised that recovery is uncertain and may take months or years, if it is possible at all.
That uncertainty has policy implications. Without clear data on which kiosk operators, geographic areas, or transaction patterns are most closely associated with fraud, regulators face challenges in tailoring rules that would meaningfully reduce harm without cutting off legitimate use. Some advocates argue for tighter verification at kiosks, such as mandatory ID checks for lower thresholds or real-time fraud warnings on screens, while others warn that overregulation could simply push activity into less transparent channels.
For now, prevention remains the most reliable defense. Consumers who understand that courts and federal agencies do not collect fines in cryptocurrency are far less likely to comply when a caller demands a bitcoin payment. The IC3 continues to urge anyone who receives such a call to hang up, verify independently using official phone numbers, and report the incident, even if no money was lost. Each report, officials say, helps build the broader picture that is still missing from the public data.
