More and more Bitcoin ATMs around us today-maybe in the gas station

Maybe your local gas station now has a sticker on the front door. Buy Bitcoin here! Has anyone used or seen anyone using these machines yet?

You must know how these work. I'm guessing there has to be fees. I'm seeing the business that controls these is called coinsource.

In fact,We have one of those coinflip crypto atms in the store I work at. Little old lady comes in talking on the phone, is trying to figure out how to work it. So I go over to help.

I'm already concerned because the elderly don't normally do crypto stuff. So I ask her what she's trying to do, and if she needs help.

She tells me the guy on the phone is trying to tell her how to use it and that she needs to send him $3,000 because he accidentally sent her too much money for her refund. In my head I'm like oh lord, not today Satan..

But I ask her to put him on speaker phone so I can help. Just as I suspected it's some Indian guy who immediately starts yelling at her not to talk to anyone. I explain the scam to her and send her over to her bank so they can show her she didn't receive any money.

Same old overpay scam, addapted to crypto. Unbelievable. I put a sign up on the atm warning about scams after that. Warn your grandparents about this shit people.

My husband and I have unsuccessfully tried to stop our parents—his are older boomers, mine younger boomers—from scammers. Overpay, Microsoft virus technicians and an obviously scammy email that he literally retrieved from his spam folder saying “the Portuguese Mail Service is going to need an iTunes gift card to release your package (Christmas gifts we sent them from the US to Portugal) from customs”.

We tried everything we could think of to convince them not to do it, personal stories of our own near scams in the early days of Craigslist, Google links to news stories, memes, funny videos of people messing with scammers, reminding them of the signs in stores, I even had a friends mom who’d been a victim of the virus repair scam try to intervene and they didn’t want to talk to her.

I could tell they all basically believed us or at least a lightbulb had been turned on, but were so ashamed that they pushed forward.

In all 3 situations, we were able to convince one of our two parents, but the unconvinced one then felt ganged up on and doubled down.

I think the amount of money they lost was nominal but we never got a straight answer and just don’t talk about it anymore.

It’s absolutely maddening. At least I now know how they must’ve felt when I signed up for a bunch of credit cards at college orientation as a penniless teen so I could get a free tshirt.

There's a variety of potential uses, from "decently legitimate" to "still not a scam" to "scam".

One of the core advantages of Bitcoin is that there's a fixed fee for a given transaction which doesn't vary based on transaction size. If the transaction fees to go from fiat to BTC and vice versa are low enough, sending money via BTC can be lower than sending via conventional methods if you're sending enough money. How much is enough depends on specifics of the transaction, the price of BTC, the currencies involved and so on. This is a completely legitimate non-scam use of BTC... With the caveat that there's no protection on the transaction. If you're using it as an alternative to Western Union (another easy service to transfer money between countries with no protections once it's cashed out), then it's valid.

On the less legitimate but still not a scam side... If you wanna buy drugs or other illegal goods, BTC is a good option there too. Harder to trace (although that depends on how this ATM runs), so it's good there. I wouldn't call it a scam to use BTC to buy drugs. While there's a chance to get scammed, the transaction is not inherently a scam. Lots of people use BTC for illegal transactions where both parties get what they expect to.

Using it to transfer money to a scammer who will abuse the lack of protection on the transaction is bad too... just like Western Union.

BTC has the potential to act as a competitor to Western Union. This is both good and bad.