The machines, mostly located in convenience stores and owned by private companies, allow customers to easily buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies using cash.
More than 26,000 machines stand today, a spike from 4,212 in January 2020, according to Coin ATM Radar.
“The FBI has seen an increase in scammers directing victims to use physical cryptocurrency ATMs and digital QR codes to complete payment transactions,” the bureau said in a public service announcement.
That’s alarming to law enforcement officials, who told CNBC that the ATMs are being used for a wide range of criminal activity.
“It leads us to believe, based on our due diligence, that these exchanges are great havens for those who are scamming an individual in the United States to send the fund out of the U.S.
This is just a new medium that has happened and that is happening, and we have real data that it is happening.
Executives at CoinFlip, another major crypto ATM operator based in Chicago, say the $900 threshold is not an issue.
So we feel right now that there are other companies out there who are not even close to our standards and they’re flying under the radar for now.