One of the core appeals of cryptocurrency — other than providing a get-rich-quick scheme for famous people with huge sway over their followers, like a sitting president or an airheaded influencer — is that it's decentralized and largely unregulated.
Of course, that also makes it a breeding ground for fraud.
Just ask Boise, Idaho gas station clerk Avalon Hardy. As Inc reports, she ended up repeatedly intervening to stop old ladies from getting ripped off by using the establishment's Bitcoin ATM.
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 Inc. "You don't have to be on the phone to send money, as long as you have the other person's information."
That didn't work.
One of the ladies, a 79-year-old, was hellbent on converting $15,000. 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 Inc, 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. In all, Hardy says she stopped seven crypto scams from happening in her store.
Crypto scams have become widespread in recent years, with revenue from these schemes jumping to at least $9.9 billion in 2024, according to the analytics firm Chainalysis, which was 40 percent more than the year before.
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