Two House members introduced a bill on June 11, 2026 that would put federal limits on how much money first-time users can push through a crypto ATM. The Stop Crypto ATM Scams Act, from Representatives Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Sean Casten (D-IL), came to wider attention on June 15 when CoinMarketCap flagged it on X. The source basis here is the bill announcement itself and the sponsors' press materials.
The pitch is straightforward. New customers would be held to a $2,000 daily limit and a $10,000 total cap across their first 14 days. Existing customers would face a $7,500 daily ceiling. Operators would also have to show scam warnings and fraud alerts before a transaction completes, hand over clear fee and pricing disclosures, and refund customers for charges tied to fraudulent transactions.
The fraud numbers behind the bill
The legislation cites FBI data showing Americans lost more than $333 million to crypto ATM scams in 2025, a 33% jump from the prior year. People aged 60 and older made up more than 85% of the losses where the victim's age was known. That demographic skew is the political engine of the bill: kiosk scams often start with a phone call impersonating a bank, the IRS, or a tech-support line, and end with a victim feeding cash into a machine that converts it to crypto and sends it to an address the caller controls.
Crypto ATMs sit at an awkward spot in the payments stack. They take physical cash, settle on-chain in minutes, and historically asked for little verification on smaller amounts. That combination is convenient for a tourist buying $80 of Bitcoin and equally convenient for a scammer walking a panicked retiree through a $15,000 "verification deposit." The daily caps are aimed squarely at the second case without banning the machines outright.
Compliance duties that look familiar to card issuers
Beyond the caps, the bill would require operators to run anti-money-laundering programs, conduct customer due diligence, file suspicious activity reports, and keep transaction and kiosk-location records. Those are the same obligations that already shape how regulated on-ramps and crypto card providers onboard users. A custodial card issuer that converts your balance to fiat at the point of sale runs KYC, monitors for structuring, and files reports for a reason; this bill would pull cash kiosks closer to that standard rather than leaving them as a lightly supervised side door.
The refund provision is the part operators will watch most closely. Mandating "timely refunds" for fraudulent charges shifts some loss back onto the kiosk business, which changes the economics of running machines in high-traffic, high-fraud locations. Federal standards would set a floor, but the bill leaves states free to layer on stricter rules, so operators in places like California or states with active consumer-protection offices could face tighter regimes still.
A nudge toward app-based on-ramps
For everyday users, the practical read is that buying crypto with cash at a kiosk is getting slower and more paperwork-heavy, especially in the first two weeks of a new account. The friction is the point. It buys time for a scam warning to register before a transfer goes out the door.
That friction also tilts the field toward app-based funding. Exchange transfers, bank-linked purchases, and card top-ups already carry fraud monitoring, dispute rights, and chargeback paths that a cash kiosk cannot match. A user who funds a stablecoin spending balance through a regulated app gets reversibility and a paper trail; cash into a machine gets neither once the transaction confirms. None of this makes the kiosks disappear, but it narrows the gap in oversight between them and the rest of the on-ramp market.
The bill is at the introduction stage, not law. It still needs committee action and floor votes in both chambers, and the crypto ATM lobby has pushed back on hard caps before, arguing they punish legitimate users to stop a minority of fraud cases. Bipartisan sponsorship and a $333 million headline give it more runway than most crypto bills get, but introduction is the easy part.
Overview
The Stop Crypto ATM Scams Act would cap new crypto ATM users at $2,000 a day and $10,000 over 14 days, hold existing users to $7,500 daily, and force scam warnings, fee disclosures, AML programs, and refunds for fraudulent transactions. It responds to $333 million in FBI-cited kiosk losses in 2025, with seniors bearing most of the harm. The measure is newly introduced and far from passage, but it signals that cash-to-crypto kiosks face the same compliance expectations already standard for regulated on-ramps and card issuers.
