Ohio investigators recovered every dollar, $15,300, that a 63-year-old Allen County woman lost to a crypto ATM scam, Attorney General Andy Wilson’s office announced October 8. The scam began in 2024 with a computer pop-up and a fake Microsoft phone number, and it ended with her cash fed into a cryptocurrency kiosk. The state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, known as BCI, traced the stolen funds, froze them and secured a search warrant to get them back. Wilson used the announcement to argue that Ohio should look at new action against the machines.
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How a fake Microsoft call led to a crypto kiosk
According to the attorney general’s office, the woman first saw a pop-up message on her computer claiming it had been hacked. She called the number on the screen, which connected her to a fake Microsoft hotline. The person on the line told her to withdraw money, convert it into cryptocurrency and send it through a crypto ATM. The announcement does not say how many trips to the kiosk it took or which company ran the machine, but it puts the total she lost, and later got back, at $15,300…