How bad it is in Arizona
Worth setting out plainly, because the scale is easy to underestimate from inside a single case.
In the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center's most recent annual report, cryptocurrency-related complaints numbered more than 181,000 nationally, with reported losses exceeding eleven billion dollars — a twenty-two percent increase year on year. Crypto investment fraud alone accounted for roughly $7.2 billion of that, making it the largest single loss category in American internet crime. Nearly nineteen thousand people lost more than a hundred thousand dollars each.
Arizona appears in the national top ten both for complaint volume and for total reported losses. For a state of this size, that is a disproportionate share, and there are two structural reasons for it. The Valley has one of the largest retirement populations in the country, and people over sixty are the single most-targeted group in crypto fraud nationally. And Phoenix has an unusually dense cash-to-crypto kiosk network, which gives a scam script a fast, local, irreversible payment rail.
That second point is not an argument against kiosks — they serve real needs, as the cash page sets out. It is an argument for understanding exactly why a stranger on the phone is so keen for you to use one.
Your refund right, step by step
This is the most useful thing on this page and it is barely covered anywhere, so we will be precise.
House Bill 2387, the Cryptocurrency Kiosk Fraud Prevention law, took effect on September 26, 2025. Among other duties it requires a cryptocurrency kiosk operator to issue a full refund — including every fee charged — to a new customer who was fraudulently induced into a transaction. "New customer" means somebody who has used that operator for fewer than 10 days.
The conditions are strict and the clock is short:
- Report to law enforcement within 30 days. File with the Arizona Attorney General's office or another law-enforcement agency, and obtain an official report determining that you were fraudulently induced into the transaction.
- Notify the operator within the same 30 days. Arizona requires operators to staff a live customer-service line continuously with a toll-free number displayed on the machine. Use it, state that you are claiming under the kiosk statute, and record who you spoke to and when.
- Provide the official report to the operator. This is the document the whole provision turns on. Without it there is no claim.
- Keep the receipt. Operators must supply one showing their contact details, the transaction specifics, the exchange rate applied and the refund policy. It is your evidence.
In the period after the law took effect, $171,332 was recovered for 35 people who did exactly this. The reason that number is not larger is almost certainly not that claims were rejected — it is that most victims never learn the right exists until the thirty days have passed. If you are reading this inside the window, act today.
If you are outside the window or not a new customer
The statutory refund may not be available, but reporting still matters. Law-enforcement tracing occasionally recovers funds at the point where proceeds are cashed out at an exchange, and every report contributes to enforcement against operators and networks. File with the Attorney General and with the FBI's IC3 regardless.
The six scripts that run in the Valley
They vary in the story and are almost identical in structure: contact you did not initiate, an authority or relationship claim, manufactured urgency, isolation from anyone who might talk you out of it, and an irreversible payment.
