Bitcoin ATMs and a Massive American Scam
Bitcoin ATMs are not a new phenomenon for Americans. These machines, which operate like regular ATMs for cash and credit transactions, are not available in many countries and are even banned in some.
However, since 2020, the number of these machines in the USA has increased more than fourfold.
Scammers have gradually realized that forcing people to deposit into these machines is an excellent way to steal their money, as the cash is quickly converted to bitcoin and the flow of money in a wallet is not easily and quickly traceable.
A particular aspect of this type of scam is targeting the elderly. It’s natural that a significant portion of the elderly are unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, and if they are deceived, they do not know the real way to recover their money. They are also unaware of the specific legal avenues and authorities that handle cryptocurrency fraud. Most scams in this area in the past couple of years show signs of organized behavior. It’s no longer possible to deceive someone with a simple call or email, as even the elderly have repeatedly heard warnings about scams through alerts, emails, and calls.
This is why, in most cases, an organized team of several people pretends to call from the police, a bank, the Treasury Department, or similar examples to trick their target into converting their money to bitcoin to save it from a threatened account. They lure the target to a Bitcoin ATM and make them scan a QR CODE, unknowingly converting their money to bitcoin and handing it over to the scammers. The amount of money lost by American citizens in this advanced type of scam has increased tenfold in one year, reaching over 110 billion dollars.
This type of scam and similar ones should be a major warning for the people and government officials of Iran.
Numerous reports about the hacking of various websites and the exposure of Iranian citizens’ information have been made public in recent months.
Modern scams start with simple calls to citizens, and citizens’ contact information is widely traded on the dark web.
Naturally, we should also expect the growth of various scams using citizens’ information in Iran.
