Happy to hear about police doing something to help crime victims. Around here you are lucky if they show up at all.
If the bitcoin ATMs have to bear the cost of restitution for scams, they’ll raise fees to cover it and/or implement measures to make their product less useful for scammers. If that makes their business nonviable, so be it.
AngryData · 1h ago
I believe the police are only doing this because they are going to keep most of the cash themselves after doing zero effort in finding out who's cash they "saved". And I think believing anything else without proof is exceedingly naive of how US cops and courts operate.
ajross · 3h ago
To be clear: Bitcoin ATMs know damn well what they're doing. These devices at best performatively disguised money laundering tools. They exist by and for fraud. Virtually no legitimate transactions happen at them.
Whether that constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt is arguable, so I wouldn't be surprised if they claw this cash back. But the core truth isn't really in question.
behringer · 2h ago
What do you put in a bitcoin atm? Cash right? So you could say the only reason to have cash around is if you're committing crimes. Otherwise you can just use you bank card.
birn559 · 2h ago
That's not at all what parent comment said or implied. When A is only used for X and B is needed for A, then it does not follow that B is only used for X.
croes · 1h ago
What about gift card shops?
RainyDayTmrw · 4h ago
There's a legal principle known as "attractive nuisance"[1] that might be relevant here. The idea is that if you create conditions, which are likely to lead to harm, and you _knew or should have known better_ (so you can't claim ignorance), then you're legally liable. This seems similar.
By that logic the US government would be liable for crimes committed using USD.
Are you saying the gas station owner has some liability?
ceejayoz · 3h ago
The US has sovereign immunity.
colechristensen · 3h ago
Ok, list some legitimate uses of bitcoin that actually exist in the wild outside of speculation and doing something once for the novelty of it that would require a bitcoin ATM in a gas station in Texas. There's four stories: speculation, money laundering, black market drugs, and "one time in 2012 I bought a pizza and that money would have bought me a mansion today".
>Are you saying the gas station owner has some liability?
Sometimes, yes, helping create a situation makes you partially liable even if the individual pieces of what you're doing are legal.
birn559 · 2h ago
Having full ownership over your money in digital form has quite a lot of disadvantages, so many disadvantages that it makes it a bad idea to do it in general. However, there are a few advantages under certain circumstances. You can easily wire money-equivalent into a country where banks are closed. It also forces countries to be a bit more cautious with acute money regulations in times of crisis (because Bitcoin is a tool to circumvent those).
I do however agree with your post on general. Bitcoin (and all other crypto currencies) is used for money laundering, speculation, doing things that would be illegal with properly regulated assets and for buying illegal things like drugs.
It's been around for quite some time, if there were more use cases we would already know by now. There has also been no substantial development since Etherium "let's make it turing complete because what could go wrong lol" and the world pretty much agreed that it's a bad idea to couple money transfer logic to publicly available code while a bug can make you lose all your money connected to that logic.
It's not like it wouldn't be possible in general. But nobody cares and obviously nobody sees how serious development would lead to anything useful (very few counter-examples like the people that created Monero).
behringer · 2h ago
Sending my kids a Christmas gift.
pyrolistical · 3h ago
What prevents police from going after regular bank atms? It’s not like banks are not used for fraud as well.
What prevent people claiming fraud again and again?
This is why we need courts, not police with power tools.
Have a feeling this is just rage bait
cturner · 2h ago
In the UK the government has somewhat gone after banks at a that level - money transfers. When someone falls for a scam and transfers money to a scammer, the government often makes the call that the bank is at fault for that. This is the absolute laziest thing the government could do, because it allocates all responsibility to the last line of defence rather than being an intelligent response to the problem.
This has led to the situation that doing a wire transfer regularly leads to intervention by the bank’s anti fraud team. This attitude has created a huge cost and risk overhead for all the banks, it forces inconvenience on consumers, and it hurts productivity of the economy.
A better way to combat fraud would be to drive improvements to the telephone network. Regulate to make the networks enforce accuracy of the phone numbers they are displaying, give the feature to reliably blacklist phone numbers, make the phone providers monitor for patterns of behaviour that look like scammer or mass marketing activity. There is no good reason that the phone companies should not have been expected to reach these standards decades ago. These fixes would assist with other law enforcement matters, such as tracing prank emergency services calls. But it requires meaningful work from policy makers, and it is not glamorous, so that never gets done.
birn559 · 2h ago
There is another easy fix: Allow banks to educate customers, to maybe delay a transaction a bit, but don't allow them to halt or deny a transaction.
behringer · 2h ago
They had a warrant. Ie, the court told them they can do it.
mrlatinos · 4h ago
Are they going to rob the Western Union next?
cwillu · 4h ago
These “ATM”'s exist to facilitate scamming people; the most charitable I'm willing to be towards the provider is that they know they're engaging in providing a very high-risk service and need to be prepared to eat the costs of fraud if they can't reverse transactions, just like any other provider of high-risk financial services.
lokar · 4h ago
The last time I checked western union is highly regulated and actively cooperates with law enforcement to deter this kind of crime.
And this kind of crime is 99% of the businesses for these ATMs.
OutOfHere · 4h ago
What kind of crime?? It's very possible the customer loses the keys to their coin, then blames the ATM.
cwillu · 4h ago
The crime that was perpetrated on the family that ATM owner knowingly or unknowingly facilitated.
Your inability to reverse transactions implies you're taking on a very high risk and should be vetting your customers very carefully. “But defi!” is not an excuse when you know that these ATM's are used for this purpose.
BeetleB · 4h ago
After reading the article, I have no idea what the crime/fraud is. This is a terrible submission.
Looks like scam callers allegedly direct people to use the machines to facilitate transactions that cannot be reversed.
OutOfHere · 3h ago
Okay, but the ATM is not complicit in the crime. To blame the ATM would be like blaming the bank for allowing the sale of a car that facilitated a heist.
switknee · 3h ago
Gift cards are much more commonly used for scams, because your grandma knows how to buy gift cards. The difference is that gift cards are very profitable to big chain stores, whereas cryptocurrency presents a threat to the status quo. Police in the USA also get to keep any unaccounted for cash or crypto they find in a search, so there's an added incentive to target the ATM.
Does western union reverse transactions? To my knowledge, they do not. Yes they co-operate with police, but so do licensed bitcoin ATM operators.
Also "defi" is just ponzi schemes. The only real use for crypto has been using it as money. People buy recreational drugs, yes. They also buy medicine, data privacy services, or donate to political causes that their government makes it risky to associate with. Depending on the coin it has the valued properties of being permissionless (can't be debanked), stable (USD-tether compared to local tin-pot currency), anonymous (monero). You may be lucky enough to have access to lots of stable currency which you can keep in a reliable bank account in a country that lets you buy everything you need, but don't make the mistake of believing that's the case for everybody.
It makes a lot of sense to seek ways to stop the scams. Distrust is expensive in a society. Targeting the money changers is certainly an idea, we'll see if it works. I predict nothing will change until the people who are running the fraud operations actually go to prison.
OutOfHere · 4h ago
Based on your argument, crypto exchanges would similarly be engaging in crime, but in reality they aren't. In the same way, there is no evidence of any crime here except for the robbery performed by Texas.
doodlebugging · 4h ago
I guess the author of that article has never used an orbital grinder since they identified it as a circular saw. The author and the editor both whiffed on that.
The story about the family losing their money to a bitcoin scammer just reinforces the perception that bitcoin is tool of and for criminals, scammers, and general low-lifes to use to launder money in the hopes that they won't be caught. People around there can't afford to get scammed as the area is very low income. $25000 was probably that family's life savings and is not far from the median annual income for the county. Bitcoin scammers should focus on scamming high net worth zip codes and leave poor people alone. They might be seen as modern Robin Hoods instead of just a bunch of robber hoods.
No matter how high the "value" of bit-coin or other shit-coins rises they will always carry the permanent stink of fraud and theft, money laundering. Other legitimate forms of payment may share some of that stink but with crypto it is a design feature.
zabzonk · 3h ago
> The story about the family losing their money to a bitcoin scammer just reinforces the perception that bitcoin is tool of and for criminals, scammers, and general low-lifes to use to launder money in the hopes that they won't be caught.
Doesn't this need more reinforcing?
doodlebugging · 3h ago
Calling all crypto-bros. Unfavorable commentary needs to be countered, again.
LOL
Every new scam reported just reinforces the perception that bitcoin and other shitcoins are the preferred exchange media of scammers and other criminals everywhere. It turns out that proposing a payment methodology that allows one to operate outside all the usual controls imposed by traditional regulated monetary systems causes those who desire to escape criminal accountability and need to operate in the shadows to adopt it as the default mechanism for managing asset flow into and within their criminal enterprises.
Does that help you?
zabzonk · 3h ago
I think you misunderstood my post - probably my fault. I am certainly not in favour of cryptocrap and was trying to suggest that the OP stressed he was neither.
doodlebugging · 3h ago
>I think you misunderstood my post
With the extra context I agree that I did misunderstand your post. Thanks for clarifying that. It's been a long, hot, humid day here and I spent too much time in the sun to be trying to write anything coherent at this time of the day. I think I need to rest and rehydrate some of my brain cells so that they might be more useful to me in the morning. Too many misfires tonight. LOL
rfrey · 4h ago
What is an orbital grinder? I've been metalworking for 20 years and never encountered one.
doodlebugging · 4h ago
Got me. It's an angle grinder in the photo. There are orbital grinders though that isn't one pictured. To me they look a lot like orbital sanders though since they use sanding pads or disks. Let me have some of whatever that author and editor were smoking when they signed off on that text.
colechristensen · 3h ago
Orbital sanders are a thing of course, but the whole "orbital" part is about the center of rotation moving around, usually in another circle. That'd just be a recipe for cutting your leg off for a grinder; a bit of an ironic mistake for GP to make while insulting somebody else's knowledge.
doodlebugging · 3h ago
>a bit of an ironic mistake for GP to make while insulting somebody else's knowledge
I agree. What the hell was he thinking?
ajmurmann · 2h ago
According to the series Scam Inc by the Economist much of these scammers are literal slaves who are held captive in southeast Asia. It is absolutely shocking and disheartening. They are often held in compounds where the scam organization is one of many tenants and the captives who don't bring in the money might get tortured, sold to other tenants for prostitution or eventually for organ harvesting. It's obviously awful for the captives, but pretty much anyone might be scammed out of a fortune and these organizations are getting more and more sophisticated to the point of setting up fake conference calls, etc.
You can replace “bitcoin” with “cash” and your argument is exactly the same. Yet we are not clutching our pearls trying to make a case for banning cash (at least I think we’re not?).
Scamming people is already a crime. Criminals have been violently robbing and scamming disproportionately in poor neighborhoods since time immemorial. Nothing about your argument is relevant or specific to bitcoin.
samtho · 2h ago
It’s not about Bitcoin, it’s about perception. Cash carries a great deal of trust and people buy things with it. It’s so much easier to separate the criminal from the means when you use the same means to pay for a sandwich earlier that day.
BobbyTables2 · 3h ago
From the looks of that photo, looks like the gas station owner is getting a new floor too!
tehwebguy · 3h ago
Infinite money glitch in Jasper County.
ruined · 4h ago
asset custody will always be the hard part
couchdb_ouchdb · 3h ago
Read the article -- what was the crime? I'm still confused.
If the bitcoin ATMs have to bear the cost of restitution for scams, they’ll raise fees to cover it and/or implement measures to make their product less useful for scammers. If that makes their business nonviable, so be it.
Whether that constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt is arguable, so I wouldn't be surprised if they claw this cash back. But the core truth isn't really in question.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
Are you saying the gas station owner has some liability?
>Are you saying the gas station owner has some liability?
Sometimes, yes, helping create a situation makes you partially liable even if the individual pieces of what you're doing are legal.
I do however agree with your post on general. Bitcoin (and all other crypto currencies) is used for money laundering, speculation, doing things that would be illegal with properly regulated assets and for buying illegal things like drugs.
It's been around for quite some time, if there were more use cases we would already know by now. There has also been no substantial development since Etherium "let's make it turing complete because what could go wrong lol" and the world pretty much agreed that it's a bad idea to couple money transfer logic to publicly available code while a bug can make you lose all your money connected to that logic.
It's not like it wouldn't be possible in general. But nobody cares and obviously nobody sees how serious development would lead to anything useful (very few counter-examples like the people that created Monero).
What prevent people claiming fraud again and again?
This is why we need courts, not police with power tools.
Have a feeling this is just rage bait
This has led to the situation that doing a wire transfer regularly leads to intervention by the bank’s anti fraud team. This attitude has created a huge cost and risk overhead for all the banks, it forces inconvenience on consumers, and it hurts productivity of the economy.
A better way to combat fraud would be to drive improvements to the telephone network. Regulate to make the networks enforce accuracy of the phone numbers they are displaying, give the feature to reliably blacklist phone numbers, make the phone providers monitor for patterns of behaviour that look like scammer or mass marketing activity. There is no good reason that the phone companies should not have been expected to reach these standards decades ago. These fixes would assist with other law enforcement matters, such as tracing prank emergency services calls. But it requires meaningful work from policy makers, and it is not glamorous, so that never gets done.
And this kind of crime is 99% of the businesses for these ATMs.
Your inability to reverse transactions implies you're taking on a very high risk and should be vetting your customers very carefully. “But defi!” is not an excuse when you know that these ATM's are used for this purpose.
Looks like scam callers allegedly direct people to use the machines to facilitate transactions that cannot be reversed.
Does western union reverse transactions? To my knowledge, they do not. Yes they co-operate with police, but so do licensed bitcoin ATM operators.
Also "defi" is just ponzi schemes. The only real use for crypto has been using it as money. People buy recreational drugs, yes. They also buy medicine, data privacy services, or donate to political causes that their government makes it risky to associate with. Depending on the coin it has the valued properties of being permissionless (can't be debanked), stable (USD-tether compared to local tin-pot currency), anonymous (monero). You may be lucky enough to have access to lots of stable currency which you can keep in a reliable bank account in a country that lets you buy everything you need, but don't make the mistake of believing that's the case for everybody.
It makes a lot of sense to seek ways to stop the scams. Distrust is expensive in a society. Targeting the money changers is certainly an idea, we'll see if it works. I predict nothing will change until the people who are running the fraud operations actually go to prison.
The story about the family losing their money to a bitcoin scammer just reinforces the perception that bitcoin is tool of and for criminals, scammers, and general low-lifes to use to launder money in the hopes that they won't be caught. People around there can't afford to get scammed as the area is very low income. $25000 was probably that family's life savings and is not far from the median annual income for the county. Bitcoin scammers should focus on scamming high net worth zip codes and leave poor people alone. They might be seen as modern Robin Hoods instead of just a bunch of robber hoods.
No matter how high the "value" of bit-coin or other shit-coins rises they will always carry the permanent stink of fraud and theft, money laundering. Other legitimate forms of payment may share some of that stink but with crypto it is a design feature.
Doesn't this need more reinforcing?
LOL
Every new scam reported just reinforces the perception that bitcoin and other shitcoins are the preferred exchange media of scammers and other criminals everywhere. It turns out that proposing a payment methodology that allows one to operate outside all the usual controls imposed by traditional regulated monetary systems causes those who desire to escape criminal accountability and need to operate in the shadows to adopt it as the default mechanism for managing asset flow into and within their criminal enterprises.
Does that help you?
With the extra context I agree that I did misunderstand your post. Thanks for clarifying that. It's been a long, hot, humid day here and I spent too much time in the sun to be trying to write anything coherent at this time of the day. I think I need to rest and rehydrate some of my brain cells so that they might be more useful to me in the morning. Too many misfires tonight. LOL
I agree. What the hell was he thinking?
First episode is available free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vUg-cLVhv-4?si=xXL3tZNl36pJj5Lk
Scamming people is already a crime. Criminals have been violently robbing and scamming disproportionately in poor neighborhoods since time immemorial. Nothing about your argument is relevant or specific to bitcoin.
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