Reformers demand regulation as kiosks spread through Massachusetts
OCT. 7, 2025…..Within the last three years, Waltham Police Detective Michael Maher started seeing more and more fraud reports involving cryptocurrency and, very often, elderly victims being swindled out of their savings.
Lately, the scams have taken on a new dimension, he told lawmakers Tuesday. Rather than fooling victims into sending money in the mail or purchasing gift cards, fraudsters are increasingly scamming people into transferring money — often thousands of dollars at a time — through virtual currency kiosks that can be found in convenience stores and other locations, often next to or near an ATM.
“They’re very easy to use, I’ve tested them myself to purchase Bitcoin. And the fraudsters often keep the victim on the phone throughout the process, guiding them in setting up the account and in sending the money onward. The transactions move quickly and can be difficult to trace,” Maher told the Joint Committee on Financial Services. “Once the victim follows the prompts on the kiosk to set up an account, they’re usually given a QR code by the scammer, which is a Bitcoin address or a cryptocurrency address. They scan that in the machine, and when they deposit the funds, they’re sent to the address that is controlled by the fraudster.”
In Waltham, where Maher is one of two detectives focused on cryptocurrency investigations, there have been at least 11 reports of fraud involving cryptocurrency kiosks so far in 2025, he said. The city banned cryptocurrency kiosks last month, but Maher said there are victims in Waltham “that are directed to other cities and towns to use the kiosks there.” And even once someone realizes they have been victimized, Maher said it’s exceedingly difficult to recover any of the lost funds. Out of about 60 cases he’s worked on in recent years, he said he’s been able to recover a portion of the lost funds in “maybe four” instances.
Maher and a parade of other law enforcement officials testified in support of legislation that would establish consumer protection requirements for machines that allow people to buy or sell cryptocurrency for cash (H 1247 / S 707). Operators would have to be licensed as money transmitters, register each kiosk with the commissioner of banks, and file quarterly reports with the locations of their kiosks. The bill would impose a daily transaction limit of $1,000 per customer.
The legislation also seeks to guard against the type of scams that Maher and others described. The kiosks would need to feature a disclosure alerting users to how frequently the terminals are being used in scams, provide all customers with printed receipts, offer live customer service, use blockchain analytics to block fraudulent users, and employ a full-time compliance officer, according to a committee summary.
“The best way to address crypto fraud is to prevent it in the first place. That’s got to be a part of the toolkit here, and a good place to start is with the more than 600 crypto kiosks that we have here in the commonwealth, because they are an entry point,” Glenn Kaplan, chief of the Insurance and Financial Services Division in the attorney general’s office, said in support of the legislation. “Now, it’s imperative that consumers receive clear information relating to these kiosks. It’s also important that the machine operators be required to impose commonsense safeguards to protect the residents.”
Middlesex County Sheriff Peter Koutoujian said the fraud alert signage at kiosks could be “a small, but very meaningful and important, way that we can stop this from happening.”
“Crypto fraud is a growing, insidious problem that will not go away without thoughtful and consistent statewide regulation and consumer protections and leadership from your body,” he told lawmakers on the committee he chaired before becoming sheriff.
Koutoujian said there has been “a surge in these scams nationally,” with about 11,000 complaints to the FBI in 2024 specifically reporting scams involving crypto kiosks. Those victims lost a combined $247 million, he said, a 99% increase in the number of complaints and a 31% increase in reported victims’ losses from 2023. Kaplan told the committee that “here in Massachusetts, what we’ve seen is reflecting those same trends.”
Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker estimated that there are between 650 and 800 cryptocurrency kiosks in Massachusetts, but said local officials often are not even aware of them.
“We spoke with a police chief from outside of Essex County, and he said that there wasn’t any of these crypto kiosks in this community. An internet search showed there was eight of them, some of them right downtown. They didn’t even know it,” Tucker said.
The committee also heard Tuesday from a Sharon Police Department detective who works on a white collar crime task force and said the consumer protections called for in the bill won’t have much of an impact and proposed his own solution.
“I’ve investigated dozens and dozens of cases involving cryptocurrency and also cryptocurrency kiosks. What I’m telling you is everything that I’ve heard today about signs and warnings and minimum amounts that can be put into a new account — those are all great. However, I do not feel like that is going to make a big difference,” Detective Anthony Lucie said.
Lucie told the committee about a case in which a person was tricked out of $10,000 at a cryptocurrency kiosk and reported the incident when they realized it was a scam. He said he traced the suspect’s crypto “wallet” and learned the transaction hadn’t registered. He found out from the kiosk company that it had “paused that transaction for 24 hours” because it noticed that it was an elderly person who had created a new account and transferred a large sum of money in their first transaction. The kiosk company in that case returned the $10,000 to the victim before it ever reached the scammer.
“The only thing that will work, I like to call a pause button. There needs to be a transactional pause on all transactions. If you want to put a minimum on it, anything over $100 needs to be [put on] a pause button for 48 hours. We’ve seen in investigations that most people realize they got scammed within 24 hours. We sometimes don’t get it reported to us until after 24 hours,” Lucie said. He added, “When this money goes into that wallet, into the suspect’s wallet, that money is gone within a minute.”
