“I remember the sound of the machine sucking up my money—whoosh, ping!,” says Weisman, 77, an actor and writer.

Dispensary staffers gave her a chair, so she could sit down for the long transaction. “I was so upset I forgot about my sick dog in the car,” she says. The criminals said the money would help the government protect her bank accounts. Before she fed in the cash, the ATM flashed warnings about scams. “But I was instructed to lie,” says Weisman, who had scanned a QR code provided by the scammers into the ATM. That code sent her money directly to their cryptocurrency wallet.

It was the nightmare start of a series of schemes pulled off by the same criminals that ultimately cost Weisman $159,000.

For years, gift cards, bank transfers and payment apps were the preferred way for scammers to get victims’ money, as each has been widely accessible and the transactions mostly untraceable. But consumers, law enforcement and the businesses behind these services have caught on to this, and protections are growing. The scammers’ solution: increasingly directing their victims to pay up the way Weisman did—at a “crypto ATM.”

These often-colorful kiosks are popping up in supermarkets, convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, liquor stores and even laundromats across the U.S.

There are more than 49,000 crypto ATMs in the United States, up from only about 1,200 at the end of 2017.

Although they are a legitimate way to convert real dollars into cryptodollars (itself a risky move given crypto’s fast-changing value), crypto ATMs are used in government impostor scams, romance scams, grandparent scams, fraudulent online sales, employment scams, lottery scams and other schemes, law enforcement officials say.

Criminals enticed people to feed $22 million into the machines for government impostor scams alone in 2021, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And they were used in at least $35 million in fraudulent transactions in 2022, the Federal Reserve reports.

Scammers love them for many reasons.

For one, the kiosks quickly move victims’ cash into tough-to-trace cryptocurrency accounts owned by criminals. “Scammers take advantage of crypto because of the anonymity,” says Special Agent Trenson Akana of the U.S. Secret Service Criminal Investigative Division. “Once the money’s on the block chain or public ledger, they can transfer and launder it in many ways.” The company that owned the machine Weisman used told her the money was untraceable, she says.

Crypto kiosks look like traditional bank ATMs—a similarity scammers exploit. “Scammers often just tell victims, ‘Go to the ATM at the convenience store’—the victim doesn’t even realize it’s a crypto machine,” says Amy Nofziger, director of fraud victim support for the AARP Fraud Watch Network.

Most crypto ATMs are licensed and used for their intended and legal purposes.

And some, but not all, warn users about scammers, says Xavier Diaz, public safety intelligence analyst with the Ohio Narcotics Intelligence Center.

Scammers use this variability to their advantage, sending their marks to unlicensed kiosks that don’t meet federal registration requirements, says Clark Flynt-Barr, AARP government affairs director for financial security.

Scam victims typically deposit cash in amounts ranging up to tens of thousands of dollars, according to law enforcement and AARP Fraud Watch Network reports. “A woman told me it took her two hours to deposit $80,000 in cash into a crypto ATM,” Nofziger says. Several states have passed laws that would tighten regulation of crypto ATMs to protect consumers.

In the meantime, protect yourself by remembering that a request to pay via a crypto ATM is a red flag that you may have stumbled into a scam, says Sgt. Jacob Pearce, a spokesperson for the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia.

Last December, the department warned residents of a wave of scams targeting older adults that involved crypto ATM payments and had cost victims up to $25,000.

“Legitimate businesses and government agencies don’t take payment through crypto ATMs,” Pearce says.