You are all hung up on the fact that you can only deposit $900 at a time per phone number (though it sounds like you can do up to $5000 per day per provider). Pretty simple to get round that by having, say, 10 phones. With a $5000 per phone per provider, you could get a lot of cash turned into BTC. Even better pay a team of lackies to take your money and access hundreds of machines within driving distance and you could launder (or at least start the laundering process) substantial amounts in a single day - millions in a year.
Yes you could purchase 10 phones in order to up your transaction limit or hire lackeys to do it for you. Now you're paying for phones, for phone activate/service, the lackeys, and the ATM fees twice. Granted the phone and service part isn't very much. I'm not knowledgeable regarding money laundering so I don't know how this compares to normal non-crypto money laundering as far as ease and profitability.
Regarding the $5,000 per phone per provider, I didn't see that in the article but maybe I missed it. Could you either quote the relevant part or cite another source? If true that's really dumb. It doesn't make much sense to have a $900 transaction limit before needing an ID but then allowing multiple transactions.
Anyway, I might be wrong about the extent of the laundering - seems the biggest elicit use is "call centre" scams that use it to get their victims money out the country.
A study by Chainalysis found nearly 75% of all illicit funds leaving the ATMs wound up being used at fraud shops, sites on the dark web that sell stolen credit card information.
Cash in, fraud out: Criminals target bitcoin ATMs as crypto popularity surges
I despise scammers and it's awful that this is yet another avenue for them to scam from. At the same time you have to be among the dumbest people to fall for this ****. The first giant red flag is that any company you've done business with having never used crypto is suddenly asking you for payment via crypto. Second, the machines have warnings about this exact thing in big bold letters on the machines themselves. Then when you go to do an actual transaction it has a big warning popup screen telling you all this again. If it wasn't crypto ATMs these people would probably still be getting scammed, just via gift cards or something else.
I find the Chainalysis quote dubious. I have never heard them called fraud shops. They are normally referred to as dark markets. Dark markets vary but mostly sell drugs. Some sell other things such as; personal information like SS numbers or credit card info, software like malware or cracked programs, even knock off products like handbags. Some sell all of the above on the same market, but it seems to mostly be drugs. I don't doubt that 75% of crypto ATM purchases end up at dark markets, I just don't think the majority of that is going to buy stolen credit card info.
Obviously a bit out of date, as "crypto popularity" is definitely not surging, which will be the biggest issue for these machines.
Personally I suspect the majority of these machines will just end up gathering dust and the companies running the will go bust.
The total amount of money funneled through crypto ATMs globally, expressed in dollars, fell to $230 million in October from $349 million in January 2021, according to data from researcher Chainalysis. The drop came even as the number of machines installed worldwide almost tripled in the period. That implies a roughly 75% decrease in the value the average unit generates.*
There would not be a direct relationship between the number of ATMs and the number of transactions or money funneled through. If someone uses an ATM in their town and that provider adds a second one on the other side of town and a third one 20 minutes away in the next town over, that person isn't suddenly going to triple their use of the ATM. It also doesn't follow that you'd see a direct relationship to the number of people using them. The person that lived in the next town over that was into BTC drove that 20 minutes to use the one ATM. The fact that another one was placed in their town doesn't increase their transactions. They just don't have to drive 20 minutes now. Not only that, but if everyone within 50 miles was using the one ATM, and now they split their transactions between the 3 machines, the total transaction volume and amount could be the exact same and you could still report that the average unit generates only 1/3 the amount it did before.
As to the drop globally in money funneled through ATMs, that could be from any number of factors. Maybe in Jan 21 a larger number of people were interested in BTC and trying to get in on the speculation train, but by Oct those people already invested and there wasn't as much interest to purchase from new users. 6 months from now that could drop even further or have found renewed interest. Crypto is volatile like that.
In any case, if ATM providers made poor judgements and rapidly expanded beyond demand then they'll have to deal with the consequences like any other business making poor decisions.
