Mary Mbugua was undergoing cancer treatment when scammers convinced her to put $5,500 into a cryptocurrency kiosk in Haverhill. Much of the money had been given to her by members of her prayer group. The scammers frightened her with false claims about drugs and criminal activity and told her how to move the money.
She was not buying Bitcoin because she wanted Bitcoin. She was trying to make a supposed emergency go away. The kiosk turned that fear into a payment that was extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
Massachusetts has seen enough of these cases that local officials are no longer waiting. Twenty communities have banned cryptocurrency kiosks, while state lawmakers continue to debate a broader crackdown. Hundreds of machines remain across the Commonwealth.
The statewide losses are significant. In 2025, Massachusetts residents filed 296 complaints involving cryptocurrency kiosks and reported more than $6.8 million in adjusted losses to the FBI. Nationally, complaints exceeded 13,400 and losses topped $388 million, with more than half of the complaints involving people over 50.
The Boston Globe found that five people lost about $128,000 at a single Haverhill machine. Massachusetts, unlike many other states, still lacks a comprehensive statewide regulatory framework for the kiosks.
That helps explain why towns and cities have started taking matters into their own hands. Haverhill adopted a full prohibition after local scam cases. Other communities followed.
The Massachusetts Senate has now gone further, passing an economic-development package that includes a ban on predatory cryptocurrency kiosks used in scams.
Whether the final statewide answer is an outright prohibition or an exceptionally strict regulatory system, the basic policy question should be simple: what legitimate benefit justifies allowing a machine to move thousands of dollars from a frightened first-time user to an unknown digital wallet within minutes?
The usual scam has little to do with investing. A victim gets a call or pop-up from someone claiming to be law enforcement, tech support, a bank or a government agency. The caller creates urgency and secrecy. Then the victim is directed to withdraw cash and locate a crypto kiosk.
The criminal understands exactly what the machine does. The victim often does not.
That imbalance is why ordinary disclosures are not enough. Someone who has been kept on the phone for hours and told that police are coming or a bank account is about to be emptied may click through every warning on the screen. Effective protections have to create real friction: transaction caps, cooling-off periods, live human intervention, fraud screening and rapid reporting procedures.
Massachusetts communities that banned the machines concluded that the risks outweighed the benefits. State lawmakers now have to decide whether residents in the rest of the Commonwealth deserve the same protection.
We will never stop every scammer from calling an older resident. But government does not have to make the payment step easy. Mary Mbugua should not have been standing at a kiosk feeding in money meant to help her through cancer treatment while a criminal controlled the conversation.
The local bans also tell Beacon Hill something important. Haverhill and other communities did not act because of an abstract argument about digital currency. They acted after seeing residents lose real money in real scams. A statewide policy should be judged by the same practical standard: does it stop a frightened person from sending thousands of dollars to a stranger before anyone has a chance to intervene?
The next victim may know nothing about cryptocurrency. That is precisely the point. If a machine is most dangerous when someone is scared, confused and using it for the first time, Massachusetts should regulate, or remove, the machine accordingly.
Chapin Fay is the executive director of Crypto Watchdog.
