Ohio freezes and returns every dollar of a $15,300 crypto ATM scam loss

The two recoveries in the reporting, this one and the 2024 Worthington case ^[7], come to $145,300 ^[15]. The earlier one got back about 46 cents on the dollar ^[21]. Against the $5.6 million in losses the unit has worked ^[5], the pair is about 2.6% ^[16].

That share is a floor. The announcement does not say how much the unit has recovered in total, or where the coins were held when agents froze them. For kiosk operators the second question matters more. A kiosk turns cash into crypto and sends it to a wallet the customer specifies. Once that wallet belongs to a scammer, the transfer cannot simply be reversed ^[9]. In Allen County, agents traced the coins to somewhere they could be frozen and then got a warrant ^[4]. "In partnership with BCI, we successfully recovered the stolen funds and returned every dollar to the victim," Allen County Prosecutor Destiny Caldwell said ^[2].

The office's own figures do not quite agree. Its $18,767 average loss ^[6], multiplied by 309 cases, comes to about $5.8 million ^[17], roughly $200,000 above the stated total. Dividing $5.6 million by 309 gives about $18,100 a case ^[18]. The average may be drawn from a different group of victims than the 309 cases.

The FBI's national figures run higher per case. The bureau logged more than 13,400 kiosk complaints in 2025 with losses above $388 million, or roughly $29,000 a complaint ^[8][20]. It cautions that some of those cases involved other payment methods ^[8].

Attorney General Andy Wilson, whose office oversees BCI, urged the state to consider action to protect consumers from criminals using the machines ^[10]. "Crypto ATMs are a favorite tool for scammers looking to steal victims' hard-earned money," he said ^[11]. Alabama has already written refunds into law ^[12]. Applied to Ohio's $5.6 million, and assuming every case qualified, Alabama's full and half refunds would come to between $2.8 million and $5.6 million before fees ^[19].

Ohio could copy Alabama, leaving the freeze as a backstop to a statutory refund. It could keep the case-by-case route and push more cases through tracing and warrants. Or nothing changes, and the machines keep running in convenience stores and gas stations ^[13] while scammers keep asking older targets for $500 to $20,000 at a time ^[14]. I think the second path is the near-term one because it needs no new law. A caseload of 309 since 2024 ^[5] argues for more freezes and more warrants aimed at whoever holds traced coins. I would expect the dollars returned to stay small against the losses. That view is wrong if Ohio publishes a recovery total well above $145,300, or if its legislature adopts Alabama's terms.