Australian financial watchdog AUSTRAC, or Australian Transactions Reports and Analysis Centre, said that “scam victims, money mules, and suspected offenders” are the top users of crypto ATMs in the country. According to the agency’s press release, its Cryptocurrency Taskforce monitored the biggest crypto ATM transactions in each state and believed that many of these are linked to scams. Unfortunately, most of these transactions were related to victims or mules who were forced to deposit the money into the machines.
“We suspected that a large volume of crypto ATM transactions were probably illicit, but disturbingly, our law enforcement partners found that almost all the transactions we referred involved victims rather than criminals,” said AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas. “We came across a woman in her 70s who had deposited more than AU$430,000 (approximately US$280,000) into crypto ATMs after falling victim to romance and investment scams. Tragically, she has no way of recovering that life-changing amount of money.”
