Albuquerque Bans Crypto ATMs and Gives Operators 45 Days

Albuquerque has banned crypto ATMs and started a 45-day clock for taking the machines out. The ordinance, which ATM Marketplace numbers O-26-49, covers installing, operating or hosting a virtual-currency kiosk in the city, and it reaches cashier-facilitated transactions too, where a shop's own staff take cash on a crypto provider's behalf. ATM Marketplace puts the effective date at 11 September. Holding, mining and moving crypto through online exchanges or a personal wallet stay legal for residents. What no account gives is the number of machines that now have to come out, or the penalty for leaving one plugged in.

Three versions of when the clock starts

The 45 days are described three ways. ATM Marketplace counts them from the 11 September effective date. Crypto Briefing says the clock starts when an operator is notified. Decrypt says operators and the businesses hosting the kiosks have 45 days to pull them, without saying from when. Those readings do not reconcile, and the gap between them is the difference between a late-October deadline and one nobody can date yet. The vote itself moves as well: Decrypt says the council passed the ordinance on Wednesday, which was 9 September, while Crypto Briefing dates the passage to 10 September.

The 90 percent claim

The number the sponsors leaned on is the sharpest thing in the record and the least documented.

"When 90% of crypto ATM transactions in Albuquerque are tied to fraud, that's not a financial service, it's a crime scene," said one of the ordinance's two council sponsors.

ATM Marketplace carries that sentence. Coin Edition renders the same claim as 90% of local kiosk transactions being used to commit fraud and scams, often against elderly residents, and Decrypt as 90% of kiosk transactions in the city being tied to fraud. None of the three publishes a study, dataset or city audit behind the figure, and the desk could not find one. It is a sponsor's claim and nothing more.

The federal tallies do line up

Two separate FBI figures, reported by two outlets, turn out to agree. Decrypt cites the bureau on nearly 11,000 kiosk fraud complaints in 2024, with losses above $246 million. Crypto Briefing cites it on $390 million of kiosk losses in 2025, a 58% rise on the year before. Carry the 2024 total forward by 58% and it lands within a few million of the 2025 one. Crypto Briefing alone puts New Mexico's 2025 losses to crypto fraud at $86.6 million, $55.8 million of that involving elderly victims. A Washington, DC finding that 93% of deposits at one operator's kiosks involved fraud, at a median victim age of 71, appears in Decrypt's account and nowhere else here. The state has been in federal argument over crypto markets before, when the CFTC sued New Mexico over prediction-market jurisdiction.

An industry that was already shrinking

The kiosk business has been contracting for months. Bitcoin Depot, which CoinDesk called the largest operator in North America, filed for Chapter 11 in May and wound down roughly 9,700 machines. Crypto Briefing lists CoinFlip, Byte Federal, Bitstop and Coinme alongside it among the operators with kiosks in Albuquerque. State bans are the wider pattern, and the two accounts disagree on where one of them stands: Decrypt has Indiana banning kiosks in March, Tennessee in July and Minnesota's ban taking effect in August, while ATM Marketplace describes Minnesota as still considering one. Fraud aimed at crypto holders has not been confined to machines this year, either, and phishing emails reached Trezor users from Trezor's own domain this month. Nothing published says what happens to an operator who misses the deadline, whoever turns out to be counting it.