Albuquerque clears every crypto kiosk from the city on a councilor's 90% fraud estimate

The 90% is a transaction-level rate, and neither of the loss totals in front of the council counts transactions. New Mexico's 2025 figure covers all crypto-related fraud reported in the state, kiosks and everything else ^[4]. The FBI's number is kiosk-specific and national ^[6]. Elderly victims account for $55.8m of the state total, or 64% of it ^[5][1]. Neither series says what share of deposits at an Albuquerque machine was scam proceeds, and the 90% is Councilor Stephanie W. Telles's own estimate ^[2].

The clock is a countdown. It runs 45 days from notification, not from the September 10 vote, so until notices go out there is no removal deadline to plan against ^[1].

Then the fee. Operators typically charge 10% to 25% a transaction, so a $1,000 cash deposit hands the network $100 to $250 in gross revenue ^[8][2]. Take Telles's figure at face value and nine dollars in ten of that Albuquerque revenue came from transactions tied to fraud. The lawful business the ordinance ends is then a tenth of the machine's take. Take the figure as wrong by a factor of three and the city just closed a business that was 70% legitimate. The council could leave both readings open. The five networks with machines in the city have to pick one ^[9].

What the published record does not show is size. There is no Albuquerque machine count and no local revenue line, so the amount at stake cannot be worked out from what has been reported ^[9]. Bitcoin Depot is the largest publicly traded operator in the US, on Nasdaq as BTM ^[10]. That listing is the one place a number might surface. The ordinance also covers cashier-assisted crypto transactions and not only free-standing kiosks ^[1]. On its face that reaches counter arrangements such as Coinme's with Coinstar ^[9].

Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota have proposed or enacted their own kiosk restrictions ^[12]. Those efforts had made the state the regulating unit, and Cryptobriefing described Albuquerque as one of the first major US cities to ban the machines outright ^[13]. The federal series is what makes the copying cheap: $390m in 2025 at a 58% annual increase implies about $247m in 2024, so one year added roughly $143m of reported losses ^[6][3]. A council can cite that without collecting a single local data point.

My read is that kiosk operators should now carry municipal removal as a recurring operating cost rather than a tail risk, because a 10-to-25% fee on cash from walk-up customers is a hard thing to defend at a public hearing, and one of the five named operators, Byte Federal, arrives with a late-2024 breach affecting tens of thousands of users already on its record ^[8][11]. The counter-thesis is that the three state efforts remain the template, Albuquerque stays an outlier, and the planning problem is legislative calendars. What would break my read is a Bitcoin Depot disclosure showing city-level volume small enough that removal never reached materiality ^[10].