Bitcoin ATMs are a rapidly growing presence in the United States and, some experts say, a rapidly growing cybercrime menace. ATMs dealing in bitcoin are similar to their cash cousins: there are PINs to punch and withdrawal fees, just like any other ATM.
Unlike cash ATMs, though, the high value of crypto makes them prime targets for hackers. So, while a cash ATM tucked away between the snack cakes and energy drinks at a gas station may not draw much attention, a bitcoin ATM gets more scrutiny from bad actors.
“It’s clear that these machines are particularly vulnerable to both physical and cyber threats, making them a prime target for hackers and thieves,” said Timothy Bates, clinical professor of cybersecurityat the University of Michigan’s College of Innovation and Technology.
Bitcoin ATMs can be susceptible to attacks where hackers install malware on the machines to capture private keys, steal funds, or manipulate transactions, which Bates said is “especially concerning for ATMs that may not receive regular software updates or security patches.” Network vulnerabilities are also a weak spot. “If the machine’s network communications are not adequately secured, attackers can intercept data transfers between the ATM and the server, leading to data theft or unauthorized access,” Bates said.
Whether it’s hackers or scammers, the government is sounding the alarm about bitcoin ATMs. The Federal Trade Commission reported this week that scam incidents have risen by 1,000% since 2020.
Ironically, a bitcoin ATM’s risks are directly related to its strengths, according to Joe Dobson, principal analyst at Mandiant, a Google Cloud-owned cybersecurity company. Bitcoin is decentralized, permission-less, and immutable. “A transaction cannot be reversed or recalled if funds are deposited to the wrong address,” Dobson said. And while many crypto bulls find bitcoin’s lack of governance appealing, that can be problematic in ATMs. “There is no governing body within bitcoin dictating who can or cannot run a bitcoin ATM, hence many independent organizations operate the ATMs,” Dobson said.
There are also old criminal tricks that might be reversible in a traditional banking situation, but in the world of bitcoin, that is not so. For example, someone could maliciously slip their personal deposit slips into the stack at the bank, tricking folks into depositing money into their account. “A similar attack can happen with bitcoin ATMs,” Dobson said. “If an attacker compromises a bitcoin ATM, they may change the receiving wallet address (or ‘account number’), effectively stealing user funds.”
But in addition to old tricks, there are newer threats bitcoin ATMs introduce that cash ATMs do not face. Many bitcoin ATMs require personally identifiable information, such as an ID or even a Social Security number to comply with financial industry Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. This information could be at risk if a bitcoin ATM is compromised.
In Middletown, Ohio, at the Middletown Food Mart in a hollowed-out end of town, a Bitcoin Depot ATM sits opposite a regular cash ATM, blending in among the potato chips, bottled water, and beer. Middletown’s claim to fame lately is as the hometown of Donald Trump’s running mate Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who has refashioned himself, similar to Trump, as a pro-cryptocurrency warrior. The Middletown Food Mart sits across the street from where Vance grew up.
‘Elon Musk told me to do it.’
Sai Patel, whose family owns Middletown Food Mart, says the bitcoin ATM isn’t very busy.
“Maybe once a month someone comes in to use it,” Patel said. And if it is someone new, Patel will patiently explain how the machine works. He also keeps an eye out for unusual activity. Although the bitcoin ATM isn’t exactly drawing crowds, Patel says a surprising number of senior citizens show up at the kiosk, alarming given the rise of bitcoin ATM scams targeting seniors.
“Elderly people come in and use it,” Patel said.
He described one encounter where an elderly woman entered his shop and headed for the bitcoin ATM, then attempted to send a lot of money somewhere but had questions about using the machine. When Patel asked the woman a few questions as to why, she said, “Elon Musk told me to do it.” Patel quickly realized she had fallen prey to a scam. “I told her, no, no, no, it’s a scam,” Patel said, and he stopped her from dumping her life savings into the machine.
Alice Frei, head of security and compliance at blockchain communications & consulting agency Outset PR, says bitcoin ATM fraud is costly, enhanced by the sometimes shadowy world of crypto.
“Cryptocurrencies are easily exchanged online, often without clear identification of the parties involved. Criminals exploit this anonymity and move money almost invisibly, often employing techniques such as cross-blockchain ‘bridges’ to further obscure transactions,” she said.
And then there’s the fact that an ATM scam probably doesn’t originate in the town where it occurs. “Many crypto exchanges involved in these activities are based offshore, beyond the reach of regulators, making it difficult to trace and recover stolen funds,” Frei added.
Basic steps to avoid bitcoin ATM scams
To protect against these scams, users should be cautious and skeptical of any request to pay through a bitcoin ATM. Legitimate businesses rarely, if ever, demand payment in bitcoin through a machine.
“Verifying the legitimacy of a transaction, particularly checking the recipient’s wallet for connections to questionable entities is crucial,” Frei said, adding that users should also use licensed ATMs from reputable operators to reduce the risk.
Frei said there are steps that users can take to verify the ownership and legitimacy of a bitcoin ATM or parties involved in transactions.
“You can verify the recipient address by checking for flagged activity on platforms like Chainabuse and running an AML check on the address using available tools,” she said, If these tools show the risk score above 70%, it’s advisable to avoid sending money. “Instead, contact the ATM operator or the person who provided the address to clarify the situation,” Frei added.
According to Frei, data shows that nearly 74% of ATMs globally are managed by just 10 operators.
The largest operator of bitcoin ATMs, Bitcoin Depot, operates over 8,000 ATMs. Its CEO Brandon Mintz says the company’s machines are designed to deter hackers. But he also disputes the claims that bitcoin ATMs are major hacking targets.
“Bitcoin ATMs aren’t typically high-priority targets for cybercriminals due to the separation of the hardware and the bitcoin wallet environments,” Mintz said. Bitcoin Depot does not store any bitcoin locally at a bitcoin ATM, and there are many layers of verification and approval processes that prevent unauthorized access to the Bitcoin Depot wallet, he said.
Additionally, Mintz said, most bitcoin ATMs, including Bitcoin Depot’s, only accept cash, so this removes the ability for criminals to use card skimmers like they can install on traditional cash ATMs. However, he says users do need to be aware of scams, and some of the same basic protocols that protect consumers from old-fashioned financial scams apply to the world of cryptocurrency as well.
“Customers of bitcoin ATMs should never send bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to unknown digital wallets or individuals they don’t know and trust. It’s important to remain vigilant and skeptical of anyone asking for cryptocurrency payments, especially if the request comes with a sense of urgency or threat,” Mintz said.
As the market leader, Bitcoin Depot has been a target of litigation and the company disclosed in its S-1 filing before going public that its users “have been and could be targeted in cybersecurity incidents like an account takeover.” A South Carolina woman sued Bitcoin Depot after falling victim to an alleged cryptocurrency scam. In another instance, authorities in Texas intervened to return money from a Bitcoin Depot ATM after a woman fell victim to a scam.
And that points to a central irony of bitcoin and the bitcoin ATM, products of technology, but ones where the most powerful weapon against fraud isn’t more technology but responsibility, Dobson said. “User responsibility is paramount in cryptocurrency. There is little recompense if something goes awry. The onus is largely on the user to take steps.”
A woman holds a cell phone featuring the DeepSeek logo, with the Nvidia logo displayed in the background.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
As China and the U.S. compete in artificial intelligence, Southeast Asia should draw from the best of both countries while building its own technologies, panelists said at CNBC’s East Tech West 2025 conference on June 27 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Julian Gorman, head of Asia-Pacific at mobile network trade organization GSMA, said it would be a negative development if Southeast Asia was forced to choose between either superpower.
“Southeast Asia is very dependent on both economies, both China and America. I think it’s pretty hard to consider that they would go one way or the other,” Gorman said.
“It’s very important that we continue to focus on not fragmenting the technology, standardizing it, and working so that technology transcends geopolitics and ultimately is used for good,” he added.
The spread of U.S. and Chinese AI companies into new global markets has been a big trend this year as both Beijing and Washington seek more global influence in advanced technologies.
U.S. and China offerings
According to George Chen, managing director and co-chair of digital practice for The Asia Group, Southeast Asia had initially been leaning towards AI models from the U.S., such as those from Google and Microsoft.
However, the emergence of China’s DeepSeek has propelled the popularity of the company’s models in Southeast Asia due to its low cost and open-source licensing, which can be used to build on and adapt models to regional priorities.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify and redistribute it. Large language model players in China have been leaning into this business model since DeepSeek’s debut.
Previous panels at East Tech West have flagged open-source models as an important tool for regions outside of China and the U.S. to build their own sovereign AI capabilities.
Meanwhile, on the hardware side, the U.S. remains a leader in AI processors through chip giant Nvidia. While the U.S. has restricted China’s access to these chips, they remain on the market for Southeast Asia – which Chen suggested the region continue to take advantage of.
However, Chen noted that there is a possibility that the AI landscape could change dramatically in a decade, with China being able to provide more affordable alternatives to Nvidia.
“Don’t take a side easily and too quickly. Think about how to maximize your economic potential,” he suggested.
GSMA’s Gorman pointed out that facing this “balancing act” between the superpowers is not new for Southeast Asia. For example, the region’s mobility industry heavily relies on Chinese tech manufacturing and hardware, as well as the U.S. in other areas such as telecommunications.
Southeast Asia’s edge
Though the U.S. and China are clearly ahead in building advanced AI models, Southeast Asia has its own edge in the global AI space, panelists said.
“If you think about AI as a technology, eventually you need to apply it to a real product or service. That’s how people can use it,” said The Asia Group’s Chen.
The region has a strong app environment which offers “great potential,” he added. “The demographic is young, which means the potential for talent is always there, and R&D cost is relatively cheaper than other places.”
Still, Southeast Asia should aim to bring in companies with advanced capabilities that domestic industries can learn from and benefit from – a strategy that China employed to catch up to the West in advanced technologies, said Chen.
Leader in AI regulation?
According to GSMA’s Gorman, Southeast Asia can serve as a neutral ground between China and the U.S., where the two sides can come together and engage in high-level dialogues on how to apply AI responsibly.
Southeast Asia can also play a proactive role in AI regulation itself, he said, citing recent examples of regulatory leadership from the region, such as Singapore’s Shared Responsibility Framework for tackling international scams and fraud.
So far, there have been few global regulations on AI. While the EU has adopted a policy, the U.S. and ASEAN countries have yet to follow suit.
Chen added that the region will need to band together and adopt common frameworks to gain a more prominent seat at the table of global AI development and regulation.
Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.
Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”
The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.
Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”
They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.
Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”
Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.
At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.
Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters: you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”
By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”
“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”
Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.
Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”
Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.
Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia.
The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.
The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.
According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion)for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.
Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.
However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.
“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.
SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.
Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.
“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.
Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.
