Albuquerque City Council in New Mexico Passes Ordinance to Ban Crypto ATMs, 45 Days to Remove
The Albuquerque City Council in New Mexico has passed an ordinance banning cryptocurrency ATMs and cashier-assisted virtual currency transactions within the city, notifying operators and hosting merchants to remove the equipment within 45 days of notification.
The proposal was initiated by District 1 Councilor Stephanie Telles and District 7 Councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn. Telles stated that 90% of crypto ATM transactions in the city are related to fraud; high fees deter legitimate users, with primary users being scammers, organized crime, and human traffickers due to the immediacy, anonymity, and difficulty of recovering cash once deposited. Fiebelkorn emphasized that they cannot wait for federal regulation, as residents have already become victims in the community. Violating hosting merchants may face daily fines and licensing risks.
The ordinance does not prohibit holding, mining, or transferring cryptocurrency through online exchanges and personal wallets. The targets are physical kiosks and counter services in convenience stores, laundromats, gas stations, etc. Local operators publicly named include CoinFlip, Bitcoin Depot, Byte Federal, Bitstop, and Coinme, which partners with Coinstar. The city council materials indicate there are about 49 ATMs in Albuquerque and approximately 102 statewide.
State-level context: New Mexico reported $86.6 million in cryptocurrency-related fraud losses in 2025, with elderly victims accounting for $55.8 million, about 53% of the state's fraud losses. Under FBI metrics, the state reported an additional $2.2 million in losses directly related to crypto kiosks in 2025, excluding unreported cases due to shame. At the national level, the Federal Trade Commission recorded over 13,460 complaints related to crypto kiosks in 2025, with losses around $388.9 million. Indiana, Tennessee, and Minnesota have banned such devices statewide, while Delaware and New Jersey are advancing similar legislation; cities like Spokane, Washington, and Layton, Utah, have previously shut them down. The largest U.S. operator, Bitcoin Depot, filed for bankruptcy in May and took approximately 9,700 machines offline.
From a market mechanism perspective, this is the closure of physical cash exchange points, not a ban on on-chain assets. Selling pressure comes from kiosk operators and convenience store landlords reliant on commissions; buying pressure does not shift to local counters but to still-legal exchange accounts and personal wallets. Beneficiaries are anti-fraud enforcement agencies and online platforms no longer siphoned off by cash kiosks; pressured are high-fee, instant, irreversible cash-in channels and operators whose balance sheets depend on community outlets. Funds are redirected from "cash into machines" to online accounts requiring KYC; if scams still require cash, they must change cities or channels.
Supplementary structure: Federal agencies like the CFTC have issued warnings that kiosk payments are "very likely scams." Albuquerque has chosen a citywide blanket approach, turning the federal gap into a 45-day countdown for removal while leaving holding and on-chain transfers in the legal zone.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The business model of crypto ATMs is to exchange convenience store rent for high transaction fees, where users pay for "cash instantly turning into coins, without questions about the source." Telles labeling 90% of transactions as fraudulent essentially identifies that those willing to endure exorbitant fees are not ordinary investors, but victims pushed to the machines by scams. The $86.6 million in crypto fraud in New Mexico in 2025, with a significant portion involving the elderly, provides the city council with local data to vote on without waiting for Washington's legislative cycle.
The capital pathway is shrinking. Bitcoin Depot's bankruptcy and the removal of nearly 10,000 machines indicate that once national network density encounters state bans and insurance/compliance costs, economies of scale can turn into liabilities. Albuquerque's removal of about 49 local machines cuts a corner off the remaining network from the city grid. Money flows from the merchant shares of kiosk operators to exchanges and wallet services that can still perform KYC; convenience stores lose rental income, not the trading volume of crypto assets themselves.
A comparable situation is states' crackdown on check-cashing stores, prepaid card kiosks, and casino chip channels: it is not about banning gambling or payments, but dismantling the last mile of cash and anonymity. The industry phase is shifting from expansion to regulatory tightening—Indiana has initiated a state ban, with Minnesota and Tennessee following suit, and city-level regulations filling the federal gap. Crypto assets remain legal in accounts, while the physical interface for cash into irreversible addresses is singled out as a criminal tool.
Structural judgment belongs to regulatory changes rewriting pricing power. The mechanism is: the combination of immediacy, anonymity, and irreversibility makes kiosks a settlement layer for scams; the city council is dismantling the settlement layer, not the asset layer. Whoever can still provide the interface for "elderly people walking in with cash" continues to earn high fees; whoever is first cleared out by the ordinance leaves the residual value of this business to neighboring cities that have yet to legislate.