NH Lawmakers Debate Crypto Kiosk Scam Safeguards

New Hampshire residents dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars into cryptocurrency kiosks while legislators in Concord spent months fighting over what, if anything, to do about it.

Ken Heideman lost $30,000 in 2022. The Nashua resident fed the cash into a crypto ATM at a local convenience store after a phone caller convinced him he was a Microsoft employee and that his bank account had been breached. The caller warned Heideman not to tell anyone. He didn’t. “An uninterrupted, unbroken sort of spell. That’s really the only way I can describe it. I was basically hypnotized,” Heideman told the House Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs at an April 7 hearing. Once that cash went into the machine, it was gone.

Crypto kiosks don’t look like much. They sit in gas stations and corner stores across New Hampshire, taking bills and converting them to digital currency. There’s no state law regulating them. That gap isn’t an accident to scammers — it’s a feature. Law enforcement officials say fraudsters deliberately steer victims toward the machines using fear and urgency, counting on confusion to move faster than common sense.

Senate Bill 482 would set rules for the machines. Sen. Tim McGough, a Republican from Merrimack, sponsored the bill. It passed the Senate on a voice vote in March, with backing from the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police, the Attorney General’s Office, and AARP. Heideman had started volunteering with AARP after losing his savings. The New Hampshire Bulletin has tracked the bill’s path since it cleared that chamber.

The Federal Trade Commission tracks crypto ATM scam losses nationally and has flagged the kiosks as a rising fraud vector aimed at older adults. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also maintains resources on fraud affecting consumers in cases like these. Neighboring states have already regulated the machines. New Hampshire hasn’t.

Then it hit the House. Hard.

Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican from New Boston and founder of the New Hampshire Emerging Technologies Caucus, introduced an amendment he said balanced business interests against consumer protection. Ammon is also tied to the Free State Project, a libertarian migration organization. The groups that had pushed hardest for kiosk regulation said his amendment gutted the bill’s teeth entirely. They called it defanged. That’s not a word advocates used lightly — the Senate version had included transaction limits and mandatory disclosures that don’t survive in Ammon’s rewrite.

The House Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs passed the amended version 10-8 on Wednesday. It’s a partisan split. The bill heads to the full House floor in 2026 with two camps who both say they want it passed but can’t agree on what it should actually require.

Ammon’s side argues the Senate version threatens a legitimate industry and sets a risky precedent for regulating other financial technology. That’s a real concern to a small number of businesses operating kiosks legally. But it’s a harder argument to make in front of someone like Heideman, who thought he was protecting his bank account and walked away with nothing.

The machines themselves aren’t going anywhere. They’re profitable, they’re largely unmonitored, and they’re sitting in convenience stores right now. The question the House has to answer is whether the law catches up before more residents find out what Heideman already knows.