The Miami Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned that scammers are using crypto ATMs more and more to get money from people who have been scammed.
The information was shared as part of a public warning on Oct. 3 about “pig butchering scams,” in which con artists pretend to be long-lost friends or potential romantic partners in order to steal money from their victims.
Scammers “fatten up” their victims by acting like they are interested in them for real. Once they have their trust, they slowly start talking about investments.
In the public service announcement, which was made in partnership with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), the FBI warned that people who lose money to these “pig butchering” crypto scams usually can’t get it back.
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But the FBI has noticed that scammers are telling their victims more and more to send money through crypto ATM machines. This is in addition to more common methods like wire transfers and prepaid cards.
“Many victims say they were told to wire money to accounts in other countries or buy a lot of prepaid cards. A new way to pay is to use cryptocurrency and ATMs that accept cryptocurrency. People lost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars because of these schemes.Â
The FBI said that in “pig butchering” scams, victims are “coached through an investment process” and “encouraged to make continuous deposits” by the scammers.
“When the victims try to cash out their investments, they are told they need to pay income taxes or other fees, which causes them to lose more money.”
Scammers have been using crypto ATMs for a long time to trick people into sending them money by pretending to be public officials, police officers, or employees of local utility companies. They tell their victims that they need to send them money to pay off bills or taxes or face more penalties.
According to data from Coin ATM Radar, there are almost 33,500 cryptocurrency ATMs in the United States. This means that 87.4% of all cryptocurrency ATMs are in the U.S.
In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sent out a warning about crypto ATM scams. They also said that scammers sometimes pretend to be potential dates.
The FBI told people to “verify the validity of any investment opportunity” offered by these types of people, watch out for domain names that look like real exchanges and URLs that are misspelt, and not download any apps if they can’t be sure of their legitimacy.
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Several times, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have warned about pig butchering and romance scams. It could be assumed that the people who fall for these scams don’t know much about technology or investing, but this isn’t always the case.
In June, it was said that a wave of pig-butchering scams in San Francisco were taking advantage of tech-savvy people from Silicon Valley. Several people lost more than $1 million each to this type of financial fraud.
