A company that lets Oregonians buy bitcoin with cash at kiosks typically found at grocery stores must stop offering the service by the end of the year after regulators found problems with its finances and efforts to prevent money laundering.
Coinme, a Seattle-based company that runs a network of over 6,000 bitcoin ATMs across the country, agreed to stop operating those ATMs in Oregon and 31 other states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, as part of a $2.5 million settlement with financial regulators.
Coinme partners with Coinstar, known for its coin-counting machines in grocery stores, to let customers buy bitcoin with cash at participating kiosks. Unlike regular ATMs, these machines let people buy digital currency instead of withdrawing cash from a bank account.
As of Wednesday, Coinme’s website listed 135 bitcoin ATMs across Oregon, many inside Safeway and Albertsons stores. The company has not confirmed how many are still operating.
The settlement comes after state regulators reviewed Coinme’s business practices from March 2023 to March 2025 and found the company did not do enough to check customers’ identities, track transactions or report suspicious activity. Regulators said those failures left its bitcoin ATMs vulnerable to criminals who could use them to move money illegally.
Washington regulators also accused Coinme last year of failing to meet state financial requirements and counting more than $8 million from unused cryptocurrency vouchers as income. Regulators said Coinme claimed the money as its own without telling customers when their vouchers would expire or turning over unclaimed funds to the state as required by law.
Coinme disputed those allegations, saying the vouchers never expired and customers could still redeem them.
The settlement resolves both cases. Coinme neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.
Regulators said they divided the penalties based on how much business Coinme handled in each state but they did not explain how they calculated the amounts. The money will not go to consumers. Oregon will receive $101,425.
Coinme has until Jan. 1, to stop operating its cryptocurrency kiosks in the states and territories or it will face another $4 million penalty.
Meanwhile, Coinstar can keep its coin-counting machines in stores. Another company could potentially take over the bitcoin-buying service, but it’s unclear whether that will happen.
Coinme did not immediately respond to emailed questions about how many of its Oregon kiosks are still operating or whether another company might take over.
Regulators said Coinme has improved its efforts to prevent money laundering but it still hasn’t fixed problems flagged in earlier reviews. As part of the deal, the company must hire an independent expert to review its safeguards and address any remaining issues.
The settlement does not identify any consumers who lost money or link the company to specific fraudulent transactions.
The case comes amid growing concern about cryptocurrency ATM scams. Oregon financial regulators warn that scammers sometimes pose as government officials, bank employees or utility workers and pressure people to deposit cash into the machines. Once victims send cryptocurrency to scammers, getting their money back can be difficult.
“Nobody legitimate, be it the IRS, a utility, a bank, or a sweetheart you’ve never met, will tell you to feed money into a cryptocurrency kiosk,” TK Keen, Oregon’s insurance commissioner and administrator of the Division of Financial Regulation, said in a statement.
The settlement also comes as Coinme prepares to change hands. Polygon Labs, a blockchain technology company based in the Cayman Islands, announced last week that it had bought Coinme to expand its cryptocurrency payment services. Polygon said the deal gives it access to licenses to transfer money in dozens of states. Coinme can continue offering its other cryptocurrency services under the settlement.
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