Sheriff, AARP warn Greensboro shoppers about Bitcoin ATM scam
Deputies and AARP went store to store in Greensboro after a victim lost $30,000 in a jury-duty scam that ended at a Bitcoin ATM.
A local woman was told she had missed jury duty, pulled $30,000 from her bank account and handed it to a person she believed was law enforcement, only to have the money funneled into a Bitcoin ATM. Guilford County Sheriff’s deputies and AARP of North Carolina spent Monday walking Greensboro stores with a blunt warning: if a caller says the matter is urgent, tells you to pay in cash and sends you to a Bitcoin ATM, it is probably a scam.
Victims are pushed to act before they can call a family member, the bank or the sheriff’s office, and the money is then moved through crypto kiosks because those transactions are irreversible and hard to trace. Those machines are being used like a modern version of the old gift-card scam, with criminals relying on secrecy, urgency and impersonation to get cash out of a victim in minutes.
Stores with cryptocurrency ATMs were asked to post warning signs and help workers spot people who may be in the middle of a scam. AARP volunteers have been visiting retail locations across North Carolina to hand out fact sheets, while the North Carolina Senior Consumer Fraud Task Force is pressing retailers to put alerts near the kiosks. Clerks should watch for anyone who seems rushed, confused or is trying to convert a large amount of cash into crypto before the money disappears.
North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall said her office’s 2024 complaints were nearly 25% cryptocurrency-related. Federal data show crypto-ATM fraud losses nationwide jumped nearly tenfold from 2020 to 2023 and topped $65 million in the first half of 2024. The FBI recorded more than $389 million in 2025 from cryptocurrency kiosk scams. Adults 60 and older accounted for 86% of losses in cases where age was known, and more than 13,460 complaints were filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
North Carolina launched a statewide crypto-scam prevention effort on July 15, 2025. Attorney General Jeff Jackson has warned that victims can lose well over $100,000 and that the money is extremely difficult to recover. Call 2-1-1 for help reporting scams and getting next steps, and no government agency will ever require payment in bitcoin.
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