Lux Vending – doing business as Bitcoin Depot – has reportedly filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office of McLennan County, Texas, accusing it of unlawfully seizing $15,000 from a BTC automated teller machine (ATM).
The authorities confiscated the amount to compensate an elderly victim who had become a victim of a cryptocurrency scam.
According to local coverage, the whole drama started at the end of April when an 82-year-old Crawford woman was browsing the Internet for a cooking recipe. While online, she received an email stating she had accidentally activated a “Ransomware” computer virus.
The woman contacted “customer support,” where she was redirected to a specially-designated “fraud investigator.” The latter claimed all her personal data had been compromised, adding that someone had written a $15,000 check to a mysterious construction firm using her details. The wrongdoer advised the victim to make a $15K cash withdrawal from her bank and deposit the money into a bitcoin ATM in Waco, Texas.
“The woman said she followed the instructions and that the guy stayed on the phone with her the entire time. The woman said she deposited $15,000, $100 at a time,” the affidavit reads.
Shortly after, she reported the fraud to the sheriff’s office, which issued a search warrant on Bitcoin Depot, seized the funds, and returned them to the woman.
“The $15,000 she put in the machine was still in the wallet that she had put it in. So we retrieved that $15,000 and brought it back to the office. We photographed it, put it into evidence, and ultimately got it back to the victim so she wouldn’t be further traumatized by these creeps,” Sheriff Parnell McNamara asserted.
He described the firm as “a bunch of vultures” that wanted to take money that rightfully belonged to the elderly person. The sheriff went even further, saying Bitcoin Depot “can go to hell.”
For its part, the company’s team maintained that the sheriff’s office had the right to confiscate the funds but not return them to the woman. The lawsuit also states that Bitcoin Depot was not the scammer, meaning they did not lure the victim into depositing the money.
A hearing has not yet been scheduled. Bitcoin Depot’s attorney – MacVane – said the entity “pledged to cooperate in any way possible” to help the investigators in the case. According to the sheriff, the fraudsters are located in another country.
The aforementioned case of the elderly Texas resident is not the only baffling one involving a Bitcoin ATM. The Missouri citizen Matthew Klinger recently received five years of supervised probation after firing five rounds into such a machine.
His reason behind the act remained unclear, however, he said he destroyed the device “so that it could not take money from anyone else.”