The support agent informed him his computer had been hacked, giving someone access to his bank account: $9,000 had been spent at a child pornography site, with another $4,000 siphoned toward online gambling.
Panic set in, Foret recalls, but the voice on the other line was reassuring, his instructions clear: Don't touch your computer, don't speak to anyone, and above all, act fast.
Shaken, Foret followed orders, withdrawing cash from his local bank. To prevent further theft, the caller said, the rest of the money needed a secure location: a Bitcoin ATM across the street at a Chevron. The 78-year-old Thibodaux native had spent a lifetime working oil fields for Texaco and says he'd never even heard of Bitcoin. Now he found himself scanning a QR code that allowed him to send money to an address recorded on something called a blockchain.
It wasn't until the next morning that he began to feel uneasy. By then, a third of his life savings was gone, fed in $100 bills through a machine.
"I was so upset that day I didn't think straight," Foret said. "They were polished, I guarantee it."
The use of crypto currencies — digital assets that operate on decentralized networks rather than regulated authorities — has exploded in recent years. So too have their physical counterparts.
Thousands of crypto ATMs are popping up at gas stations, pharmacies and vape shops across the country. The companies that own them claim the machines make it easier for the tech-unsavvy to invest in crypto. But many law enforcement officials argue that same convenience allows criminals to easily scam people and launder money.
"Right now, this is not a system that gives any confidence to law enforcement that it's being legitimately used," Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said. "There are a lot of smarter things these companies could do to make it a legitimate enterprise."
The Federal Trade Commission reports that fraud losses at crypto ATMs increased tenfold between 2020 to 2023, with $66 million reported in the first six months of 2024. In Louisiana, as local law enforcement struggles to manage the new threat, legislation has been introduced recently that would force companies to help curtail criminals.
Crime's new frontier
As the realization that he had been scammed dawned on Foret, he contacted Sgt. Gerard Lotz, who handles cyber fraud for the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office and is also a member of the Louisiana Cyber Crimes Division, a state-run program that collaborates with the U.S. Secret Service.
"They needed someone to investigate crypto, I just happened to be standing in the hallway," said Lotz, who admits most of what he initially learned about Bitcoin came from 12-year-olds on YouTube. "They say I'm the foremost expert in cryptocurrency in Lafourche Parish."
Lotz first noticed crypto ATMs appearing in his mostly rural parish over the summer of 2023. Since then, he has come across 30 or so of the machines in Lafourche. During the first 10 months of 2024, Lafourche residents reported losing $1.6 million to cryptocurrency scams, with $657,000 fed solely through ATMs.
"If 2% of the population of Louisiana accounts for $1.6 million in cryptocurrency fraud, how much is it for the whole state of Louisiana?" Lotz said.
Many cases go unreported by both victims and law enforcement. When they are brought to light, resource-strapped police departments rarely pursue them since the investigations are unlikely to end in arrests, Lotz said.
"The scam industry has evolved in the past years," said Paul Sibenik, founder and CEO of Crypto Forensic Investigators, a private firm many people turn to when their losses exceed six figures.
While 90% of his cases involve scammers operating from overseas — often calling from countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos — Sibenik says the schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The groups behind them are larger, more organized and frequently linked to transnational enterprises such as Chinese crime syndicates, or, in the case of North Korea, state-sponsored schemes.
Many scammers are often victims themselves, Lotz said. According to a United Nations Report, an estimated 220,000 people have been trafficked into Southeast Asia for the sole purpose of conning people, forced to call around the clock from industrial-scale compounds. Globally, The Economist reports that up to 1.5 million people — both coerced and voluntary — are involved in the industry.
Despite his devastating loss, Foret expressed some sympathy for many caught up in the business.
"I guess they almost have to do it," he said. "That's rough."
Tricky tactics
Lotz and Sibenik said getting people to the ATMs is made easier by personal information posted on the dark web by criminal hacker groups. Fraudsters pose as customer service representatives from banks or tech companies, develop business or romantic relationships, or impersonate local and federal government agents to convince victims they owe bogus fines and fees — such as alleged Social Security overpayments or outstanding warrants.
In three incidents in Lafourche, scammers targeted newer gas station employees, posing as their bosses and convincing them to transfer cash from their office's safe into the ATMs, said Lotz. Others in the parish were victims of a nationwide scheme run by a prison gang in Georgia, where cellmates introduced themselves as local law enforcement.
"One represented themselves as our chief deputy, one as the detective captain," Lotz said.
The main giveaway, he said, was that they called it "Lafourche County."
After cash is converted to Bitcoin — or any of the thousands of other cryptocurrencies — the funds are typically sent to an online wallet controlled by the scammer. By the time victims realize they have been defrauded, thieves have usually already used "mixing services" — tools that combine stolen cryptocurrency with funds from other sources and distribute it across multiple accounts to obscure the origins of the scammed money.
"It's like starting a race 50 laps into the race," Lotz said.
In rare cases where investigators identify a wallet address, blockchain technology — a public ledger recording all cryptocurrency transactions — enables them to trace funds between accounts.
"The problem is, you don't know who is tied to that Bitcoin," Lotz said. "I can't give a search warrant to Bitcoin because it doesn't exist; it's a concept."
So investigators monitor transactions but usually can't do much until funds end up in an online exchange. Analogous to traditional banks, exchanges are law enforcement's best chance to recover funds because they provide an opportunity to freeze assets. But that requires cooperation, and most criminals use exchanges based outside the U.S. in countries like the Bahamas or the Seychelles with weak regulations and minimal identification requirements.
"That way if a warrant is served from another country or a law enforcement agency, they can say 'Hey I don't have any info on this person,'" he added.
Even if the exchange provides personal information, Lotz says, law enforcement sometimes has to wait days for search warrants to be processed by a judge, by which point the scammer has usually offloaded the funds back into cash. Private companies like Sibenik's face similar restraints once they locate stolen money.
"In order to recover funds that are frozen, pretty much every exchange wants a law enforcement request," Sibenik added. "This crypto can be very fast, and the legal system does not move fast."
Lawmakers respond
Crypto ATM companies say they facilitate access to digital currency. Most machines charge between 15% and 30% in transaction fees. By comparison, major online exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken charge 0.1% to 0.4% and allow users to convert cash to crypto from home.
"It begs the question why anybody would put cash into a machine like this when they could do it a different way." Attorney General Murrill said.
In February, Athena Bitcoin, a major Bitcoin ATM provider, was sued in Maryland for allegedly enabling elder financial abuse. The lawsuit claims the company allowed exploitation by failing to implement adequate safeguards.
Bitcoin Depot, the largest Bitcoin ATM network in the world, received $5,418 from Foret's transactions in February. Lotz says it has refused to return the money, despite law enforcement requests. In an email response to The Advocate, a representative for the company said Bitcoin Depot was unable to comment on the story.
"The most vulnerable people are being affected by the machines, and these companies are taking 30%." Lotz said.
Reacting to the local cases, Lafourche Sheriff Craig Webre called the Attorney General's Office to raise the alarm. The conversation prompted the introduction of House Bill 483 during this spring's state legislative session.
Sponsored by Rep. Mark Wright, the bill would place new restrictions on crypto ATM use, including a $3,000 daily transaction limit, a mandatory 72-hour waiting period before transactions are processed, and a warning on each machine stating that "no state or government official will ever request that cash be deposited into a Crypto ATM."
Murrill said the three-day transaction hold is intended to give law enforcement a window to recover funds in cases of suspected fraud, citing incidents where Lafourche sheriff's deputies were able to seize cash from an ATM moments before it was collected by an armored truck.
The $3,000 daily cap also aims to deter money laundering, as current machines allow unlimited cash deposits — activity that if large enough would automatically raise red flags from the IRS in traditional banking systems.
Murrill says the bill wouldn't interfere much with the broader crypto industry. On May 12, it passed the House with a 98-0 vote, and the Senate is expected to vote on it Sunday.
After a training course in Alabama with the National Computer Forensics Institute, Lotz was better able to wrap his head around the technology. Tracking software supplied by the federal government has also helped him trace about a quarter of Foret's stolen funds to a UK-based exchange before they could be withdrawn.
He expects Foret to recover that portion of his money any day, returned in the form of Bitcoin. Thanks to bullish markets, the value of his reclaimed funds has grown a few hundred dollars since they were first stolen.
As he waits, Foret's last request was simple.
"Put it out there and let people know how they do it," he said.
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