Texans reported $56.8 million in losses to cryptocurrency kiosks last year, more than any other state, according to FBI figures presented to a House committee on Thursday. The total accounted for 1,179 of the 13,460 complaints logged nationally in 2025, a year in which reported losses rose 58% to $389 million. With roughly 4,000 machines operating in gas stations and convenience stores across the state, per the Texas Tribune, lawmakers are now weighing whether to follow Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota in banning the kiosks outright.
The testimony on record
The House Committee on Homeland Security, Public Safety and Veterans' Affairs convened to hear invited testimony on foreign financial influence and turned quickly to the kiosks. "In my career, I've never seen a more efficient, cleaner way to steal money," Rep. AJ Louderback said. Kelley Currie, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the committee that Interpol now treats scamming as an industry comparable to drug and human trafficking. She went further, stating that the kiosks in gas stations "are run by Chinese money launderers." The Justice Department has charged Chinese nationals over crypto fraud compounds in Southeast Asia and prosecuted Chinese money laundering networks moving scam proceeds, but has not said those groups generally operate kiosks.
Recovery is the bottleneck
Jesse Saucillo, deputy commissioner at the Texas Department of Banking, said recovery is close to impossible once the money moves. Funds typically go to an unhosted wallet, he said, which then "gets into a mixer" and beyond, leaving it "very hard to get any of that back." AI-generated impersonation of police and state agencies is making the approach calls more convincing, he added. The mechanics he described, unhosted wallets, mixers, no custodial intermediary, are observable on-chain; the attribution to specific actors is not.
State patchwork hardens
Thirty states have enacted legislation relating to crypto kiosks since 2023, according to AARP. South Dakota caps transactions at $1,000 a day and $10,000 a month and requires full refunds for fraud victims; Wisconsin and Virginia have similar caps. Maine's regulator secured a $1.9 million settlement from Bitcoin Depot to reimburse victims. Indiana banned the machines outright in March, the first state to do so, under a law that lets the attorney general sue both operators and the shops hosting them. Nearly 900 kiosks were running there when the governor signed it. Tennessee and Minnesota have since followed.
Texas signals something abrupt
Committee chair Rep. Cole Hefner said Texas would look at "doing more than regulating them," and hinted at a bill. "I got a pretty good idea coming down," he told colleagues. "And it's kind of simple, but kind of abrupt." The phrasing suggests a ban modeled on Indiana's rather than a cap-and-refund framework. Whether the legislature moves in the next session remains the open question; the money already moved last year.