The last time I checked western union is highly regulated and actively cooperates with law enforcement to deter this kind of crime.

And this kind of crime is 99% of the businesses for these ATMs.

These “ATM”'s exist to facilitate scamming people; the most charitable I'm willing to be towards the provider is that they know they're engaging in providing a very high-risk service and need to be prepared to eat the costs of fraud if they can't reverse transactions, just like any other provider of high-risk financial services.

To be clear: Bitcoin ATMs know damn well what they're doing. These devices at best performatively disguised money laundering tools. They exist by and for fraud. Virtually no legitimate transactions happen at them.

Whether that constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt is arguable, so I wouldn't be surprised if they claw this cash back. But the core truth isn't really in question.

What is an orbital grinder? I've been metalworking for 20 years and never encountered one.

> The story about the family losing their money to a bitcoin scammer just reinforces the perception that bitcoin is tool of and for criminals, scammers, and general low-lifes to use to launder money in the hopes that they won't be caught.

Doesn't this need more reinforcing?

According to the series Scam Inc by the Economist much of these scammers are literal slaves who are held captive in southeast Asia. It is absolutely shocking and disheartening. They are often held in compounds where the scam organization is one of many tenants and the captives who don't bring in the money might get tortured, sold to other tenants for prostitution or eventually for organ harvesting. It's obviously awful for the captives, but pretty much anyone might be scammed out of a fortune and these organizations are getting more and more sophisticated to the point of setting up fake conference calls, etc.

First episode is available free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vUg-cLVhv-4?si=xXL3tZNl36pJj5Lk

You can replace “bitcoin” with “cash” and your argument is exactly the same. Yet we are not clutching our pearls trying to make a case for banning cash (at least I think we’re not?).

Scamming people is already a crime. Criminals have been violently robbing and scamming disproportionately in poor neighborhoods since time immemorial. Nothing about your argument is relevant or specific to bitcoin.

By that logic the US government would be liable for crimes committed using USD.

Are you saying the gas station owner has some liability?

In the UK the government has somewhat gone after banks at a that level - money transfers. When someone falls for a scam and transfers money to a scammer, the government often makes the call that the bank is at fault for that. This is the absolute laziest thing the government could do, because it allocates all responsibility to the last line of defence rather than being an intelligent response to the problem.

This has led to the situation that doing a wire transfer regularly leads to intervention by the bank’s anti fraud team. This attitude has created a huge cost and risk overhead for all the banks, it forces inconvenience on consumers, and it hurts productivity of the economy.

A better way to combat fraud would be to drive improvements to the telephone network. Regulate to make the networks enforce accuracy of the phone numbers they are displaying, give the feature to reliably blacklist phone numbers, make the phone providers monitor for patterns of behaviour that look like scammer or mass marketing activity. There is no good reason that the phone companies should not have been expected to reach these standards decades ago. These fixes would assist with other law enforcement matters, such as tracing prank emergency services calls. But it requires meaningful work from policy makers, and it is not glamorous, so that never gets done.

They had a warrant. Ie, the court told them they can do it.