An employee of the AMOCO service station in the city center of Stillwater called the police in October to point out that a 75-year-old woman fed $ 20 tickets-one after the other-in a cryptocurrency automatic window.
As the police arrived, the woman had deposited $ 5,820 in the machine and planned to deposit additional $ 14,180 in cash, said Det. DAVE WULFING of the Stillwater police service.
“Someone called her and told her that she had an” too paid “$ 20,000 on her Paypal account,” said Wulfing. “They told him to go to his bank (Royal Credit Union in Oak Park Heights) and to withdraw $ 20,000.”
Since January 1, 2023, Stillwater police have taken 31 swindle reports linked to the crypto residents totaling nearly $ 213,000, with at least half of this amount having been deposited in automatic distributors of cryptocurrency tickets located in the city, he said. A resident, a 70-year-old woman, lost $ 29,000 in August, he said.
Earlier this month, the City Council of Stillwater discussed the future with a plan for the ban on automatic distributors of cryptographic tickets within the limits of the city. There are at least four of these machines currently active in Stillwater, and city officials say that it is difficult to determine who owns or operates them.
Mayor Ted Kozlowski said the machines have become essential tools for fraudsters and give international criminals a local pipeline on victims’ bank accounts. “It is far too easy to tackle people, and it is impossible to trace if we have to recover funds,” said Kozlowski.
Warnings do not work
The automatic distributors of cryptocurrency tickets accept customer species, then credit it to the account of another person; Move it from one account to another account for the same person, or give up the control of the currency to another person, said the prosecutor of the city Korine Land.
“They are not the same as a transfer of electronic funds from the bank to the bank or an automatic species distribution window,” she said. “These automatic ticket distributors only accept species and then make one of these transfers with it.”
The law of the State requires that anyone engaged in cryptocurrency as a business be required to have a state license of the Commerce Commissioner, to disclose certain details to the Customer before the transaction can begin and maintain the recordings of all transactions for five years, but that Land has declared that few companies really obtain a state license.
Each machine must publish a warning asking the users if they have been sent to make a payment before a transaction can start.
“Warning: losses due to fraudulent or accidental transactions are not recoverable and transactions in virtual currency are irreversible,” said the warning. “Virtual currency transactions can be used by scammers usurped in the identity of their loved ones, threatening prison sentences and insisting that you withdraw money from your bank account to buy a virtual currency.”
But warnings do not seem to work.
“The cash amounts deposited in these transactions are narcotic, and the funds are almost impossible to recover and attempts to do so require significant local, state and federal resources,” Land wrote in a note at the City Council in Stillwater. “Transactions are almost impossible to trace.”
Related: “Once it has disappeared, there is no
Regulate or prohibit
The law of the license state only the activity of cryptocurrencies, not the ATM location.
Forest Lake and Woodbury officials are considering prescriptions that would require the registration of the company that hosts automatic ticket distributors. Users should interact with a store clerk before starting a transaction, employees would be forced to report suspicious activity and warning signs would be necessary, among others, said the Land’s Memo note.
Wulfing said it was happy that Stillwater, 19,000 inhabitants, moved to ban automatic ticket distributors. The city’s police service has limited resources, and the crooks “become more and more sophisticated and more difficult to find,” said Wulfing. “We do not have the budget to manage investigators to foreign countries.”
Police chief Brian Mueller said he saw no value to have automatic cryptocurrency tickets in the city.
“We are considering $ 11,000 per month of fraud in the past 12 months,” he said. “We just don’t see any good being done.”
People who legitimately deal with cryptocurrency generally do not use automatic ticket distributors because there are significant costs associated with these transactions, said Mueller.
Det. Austin Peterson, of the Stillwater police service, sought a prescription language. Lands should introduce a prescription that would prohibit the automatic distributors of cryptocurrency tickets in the city at the meeting of the April Council. The proposed order requires two readings and must then be published before it is effective; The sooner who could happen is the end of April, Land said.
A victory
Anyone who has asked to transform a deposit into a cryptocurrency ATM should call 911 and speak with local police before taking measures, Kozlowski said. “These criminals become very capable of using artificial intelligence to deceive people by making believe that a family member is in trouble or that someone has compromised information about you personally.”
Wulfing said the department had received good news this week concerning the October case involving the 75 -year -old woman. The police were able to recover $ 4,339 from the $ 5,820 they have deposited, he said.
Det. Ryan Mitchell determined that the suspect lived in Western Bengal, India, and served a legal process on the exchange of Binance cryptocurrency, Wulfing said.
“The exchange is the location that exchanges the victim’s crypto to the suspect’s digital portfolio”, he said. “The $ 4,339 were still in the portfolio to which the exchange sent it, so we were able to make them freeze the portfolio with a letter of application of the law.”
Mitchell has drafted a legal process which was served to the officials of the Binance to seize the $ 4,339, which they did, he said. They then sent the money to a portfolio controlled by the STILLWATER Police Department Investigation Unit.
“We then returned it to the victim,” said Wulfing. “We were very lucky that the money was not far from the wallet before the frost.”
Wulfing said it was the first time that investigators have used a new crisis program “initiated to try to recover part of this money, and it worked,” he said. “Often, however, let’s go. They will put a whole bunch of money from the victims in a single portfolio, then they will spread it on 200 wallets, then it will go to 200 additional wallets, and finally, the path will escape. “”
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