The call always starts with a panic. Your bank account has been hacked. Your grandson is in jail. There is a warrant out for you. Then comes the instruction: go get cash, drive to a gas station, and feed it into the crypto machine by the door. Stay on the phone. Tell no one.

Once the money goes into that machine, it is almost always gone for good.

How big this has gotten

In 2025, the FBI received more than 13,000 complaints involving cryptocurrency kiosks, with more than $388 million reported lost. That was a 58 percent jump over the year before. More than half of the complaints came from people over 50, and Americans 60 and older lost more than $257 million.

Those are only the losses people reported. Plenty of victims are too embarrassed to tell anyone.

Three things worth sharing with a parent or grandparent

• A real bank, police department, or government agency will never ask anyone to pay with cash at a crypto kiosk.
• A caller who insists on secrecy and urgency is running a scam. Hang up, then call your bank using the number on the back of your card.
• If money has already gone into a kiosk, call the bank and local police right away, and report it at ic3.gov.

What I’ll push for in Helena

Montana can make these machines much harder to use against our neighbors. Lawmakers in both parties are already working on this, and I’d sign on.

• Transaction limits, especially for first-time users, so a single panicked phone call cannot drain a lifetime of savings.
• Plain-language warnings at the machine that say exactly what the scam sounds like.
• A short window to reverse a first-time transfer, so a family that catches it quickly can get the money back.
• Licensing, so kiosk operators answer to a Montana regulator.
• Funding for the Department of Justice’s consumer protection office, because a law nobody enforces is an empty promise.

Our local banks and credit unions see these scams up close, and many already step in when a customer pulls out an unusual amount of cash. They deserve a state that backs them up.

I gave the same answer in the Billings Gazette voter guide. Protecting Montanans from these scams is one place where the candidates in this race agree, and that is a good start.

Send this to someone you love. It might be the thing they remember when the phone rings.

If this matters to you, help us keep showing up at smithformontana.com/donate.