Who built this site, and why

The publisher

This site is written and kept up to date by the fraud-prevention team at Byte Federal, Inc., a company in Venice, Florida, that runs a network of bitcoin ATMs. Byte Federal is registered with FinCEN as a money services business (BSA ID 31000340957702) and publishes its NMLS ID (2327474) and the states where it holds money transmitter licences on its licences page. You can check any operator’s licences yourself on NMLS Consumer Access.

We love bitcoin

Byte Federal was founded in 2016 by people who believe in bitcoin: money that no central authority can print or manipulate, that anyone can own with a few dollars in cash, with or without a bank account. We design, build and run our own machines, more than 1,350 of them in over 42 states today, so that anyone can buy it. In the words of our co-founder, Lennart Lopin, the company’s mission is “to utilize the unique financial technological revolution of cryptocurrency to restore economic power and prosperity to the people.” Read the letter.

Blamed for a crime that starts on the phone

So it is painful to watch a technology we love blamed for fraud it didn’t start. By the time a scam victim reaches a kiosk, the crime is almost over. They have been on the phone for an hour or more, told their savings are in danger, coached on what to say at the bank and warned that the machine “will try to stop them”. The kiosk is the last step of the con; the lie came first, and it came from somewhere else. When the FTC studied reports from people who lost money at a bitcoin ATM, the most common first contact was a phone call, in about 47% of cases; next came pop-ups, online ads and emails, which usually carried a phone number to call.

Those calls travel over phone lines that leak like a sieve: networks that still let callers fake the number on your screen, and that carried an estimated 52.5 billion robocalls in 2025. The fake ads and “wrong number” messages run on social platforms and ad networks. In our view, those companies do far too little to stop the scams that start on them. A licensed kiosk operator has to verify its customers, keep records and report suspicious activity to the government; the networks that carry the scammer’s voice to the victim answer to far lighter rules. We think protection has to start where the scam starts, and we would rather people heard the warning before they reached any machine, ours or anyone else’s.

Nobody grounded the airplane because cartels fly cash and drugs in it. Nobody shut down the phone network, the banks’ wire transfers or the gift-card rack because scammers use them too. When criminals misuse a good tool, the answer is to catch the criminals and make the tool harder to misuse, which is what licensed operators do every day, not to take it away from everyone else. Bitcoin deserves the same.

What this site does

It does three things: it helps people stop the call and recognise the script; it helps victims act in the first hour; and it sets out the facts about crypto ATMs and fraud, including Byte Federal’s view of which laws protect people and which only move the fraud somewhere else.

What Byte Federal does at its own machines

• ID on every transaction, from the first dollar. There is no anonymous tier.
• AI risk scoring. Every transaction is screened in real time for the signs of a coached customer: duress, phone-guided behavior, unusual patterns.
• Live operator intervention. Trained compliance staff review flagged transactions for signs of coaching and can hold one for review.
• Cool-down periods. High-risk profiles must wait before a transaction goes through, which gives the customer time to reconsider.
• On-screen warnings. A scam warning the customer must acknowledge before every transaction, with stronger warnings about government-impersonation scams for customers over 60.
• A live, recorded call with every customer aged 60 and over. A member of the compliance team calls before they buy and explains what is happening, as extended due diligence under the USA PATRIOT Act.

Byte Federal reports that, as of June 2026, 60% of the customers aged 60 and over it calls do not go on to make the transaction. That figure is Byte Federal’s own compliance data, published on its fraud-prevention page.

Where this site takes a side, and where it doesn’t

The help pages treat every operator the same. The operator phone numbers on If you were scammed are listed alphabetically, each taken from the operator’s own website; if you used a Byte Federal kiosk, our number is in that list like everyone else’s. The state-law pages report each law as it is written, deadlines included, because a victim is entitled to use the law that applies to them.

Where the site argues, it says so: the facts page and the end of the state-law page carry Byte Federal’s view, with the evidence and its sources, so you can check it.