Several new laws went into effect Wednesday in South Dakota, including Senate Bill 98, which aims to protect consumers from scammers by requiring Bitcoin ATM operators to register their machines, capping daily transactions at $1,000, mandating that customers receive receipts, and forcing operators to refund victims of scams conducted through their kiosks.
The significance is structural. SB 98 does not merely ask kiosks to warn customers or monitor for fraud — approaches operators have adopted voluntarily for years. It hardwires consumer protections into the transaction itself: a hard dollar ceiling, a registration obligation the state can verify, and a refund duty that attaches after the money is gone. These are requirements an operator cannot satisfy through better fine print, clearer fee signage, or a fraud-monitoring dashboard.
What SB 98 Requires
The law establishes four core obligations for Bitcoin ATM operators doing business in South Dakota.
Key Provisions of SB 98:
- Machine registration: Operators must register their Bitcoin ATMs with the state.
- $1,000 daily transaction limit: Caps how much a customer can transact per day.
- Mandatory receipts: Customers must receive a receipt for each transaction.
- Scam-victim refunds: Operators must offer refunds to consumers defrauded through their machines.
Each provision targets a different failure point that has surfaced in enforcement actions nationwide. Registration gives the state a roster of who is operating and where — a baseline that many states still lack. The daily limit constrains the large lump-sum transfers that fraud victims are typically coached to make. Receipts create a paper trail. And the refund provision shifts at least some of the cost of fraud onto the operators whose machines processed it.
A Design-Level Mandate, Not a Disclosure Rule
The line separating SB 98 from earlier regulatory efforts is worth drawing precisely. For most of the industry's history, consumer protection at the kiosk meant two things: telling customers what fees they were paying and running anti-fraud checks against suspicious patterns. Both are disclosure-and-monitoring tools. Both leave the actual transaction untouched.
South Dakota's daily cap and refund duty are different in kind. A $1,000-per-day ceiling constrains what the machine can do regardless of what the customer chooses or what a scammer instructs. A refund obligation shifts a defined slice of fraud loss onto the operator's balance sheet after the fact. Neither can be engineered away with a clearer warning screen.
Whether a $1,000 cap measurably reduces scam losses — or whether determined bad actors simply route victims across multiple machines and locations to defeat it — is an open policy question the bill text does not resolve. The mechanics of how the cap interacts with multi-location transaction strategies, and how operators are expected to enforce a per-customer daily limit across a distributed kiosk network, are among the compliance details that will be tested in practice.
Where SB 98 Fits in the State-Law Wave
South Dakota is not acting alone. The refund-liability model that anchors SB 98 has become the emerging template across several states enacting crypto-kiosk laws in the past year.
Recent State Regulatory Activity:
- Florida: Enacted a scam-refund mandate, the first state law to shift fraud liability toward operators.
- New Hampshire: SB 482-FN requires operators to fund scam refunds under a new enforcement template.
- Federal: Congress is advancing a bipartisan crypto-ATM bill with registration provisions after documented fraud losses.
- South Dakota: SB 98, combining registration, a $1,000 daily cap, receipts, and refunds, effective this week.
The through-line is a shift from asking operators to disclose risk to requiring them to absorb it. What distinguishes South Dakota's approach is the combination: Florida and New Hampshire focused primarily on post-transaction remedies, while SB 98 pairs a refund duty with a hard transaction cap that attempts to prevent fraud before it happens.
When Florida moved first on refund liability and New Hampshire followed with its own funding mandate, the question was whether those laws were outliers or a signal. South Dakota's SB 98 suggests the latter. The design-level approach is spreading, and each new state that adopts it raises the baseline other legislatures will measure against.
Coverage Gap: Effective Date and Bill Status
One caveat for readers tracking this closely: while the source reporting states SB 98's provisions took effect Wednesday, the official bill status, enactment date, and precise effective date have not been independently verified against the South Dakota legislative record. The statutory text governing exact registration procedures, enforcement authority, and the scope of the refund obligation should be confirmed directly before operators finalize compliance plans.
The scope of the refund provision — whether it shifts liability entirely to operators or creates a shared responsibility framework, and what evidentiary standard a victim must meet — is not spelled out in the available source packet. The number of Bitcoin ATMs currently operating in South Dakota, and which companies operate them, is also unverified. No major operator has publicly stated a compliance timeline for South Dakota or challenged the law on constitutional grounds as of this writing.
What This Means for South Dakota Consumers
If you use a Bitcoin ATM in South Dakota, the law now gives you protections that did not exist before this week.
Your Position Under SB 98:
- You cannot move more than $1,000 through a machine in a single day — a friction point that is inconvenient for legitimate large purchases but designed to interrupt high-dollar scam transfers.
- You are entitled to a receipt for every transaction. Keep it. It is your record if you later need to pursue a refund or file a complaint.
- If you were defrauded, the law provides for refunds from operators. Document the transaction, retain your receipt, and report the fraud promptly.
- If anyone you don't know is directing you to a Bitcoin ATM to "resolve" a payment, tax bill, or account problem, stop — that is the signature of a scam. See our consumer protection resources.
The refund provision creates a pathway, but it does not guarantee automatic recovery. Consumers who believe they were victimized should document all communications with the fraudster, retain their transaction receipts, and contact state consumer protection authorities.
What This Means for Operators
SB 98 is a compliance obligation you cannot meet with a policy PDF. Registration is verifiable, the cap is a system control, and the refund duty is a financial exposure that lands after a transaction clears. For operators running legacy hardware, software upgrades or machine replacements may be necessary.
Operator Action Items:
- Confirm registration status. Verify the exact filing procedure and deadline with the state before assuming your machines are compliant.
- Enforce the $1,000 cap across your network. A per-customer daily limit is only meaningful if it holds across multiple kiosks and locations — a technical challenge for distributed fleets.
- Model the refund liability. South Dakota now joins Florida and New Hampshire in placing scam losses on operators. Multi-state operators should be building a consolidated view of refund exposure, not tracking each state as a one-off.
- Watch the enforcement backdrop. State attorneys general in Massachusetts, Iowa, and Missouri have opened consumer-protection actions and investigations into kiosk operators, and Bitcoin Depot — long the largest U.S. operator by kiosk count — began an orderly Chapter 11 wind-down in 2026, underscoring how quickly business risk in this sector can escalate.
The strategic takeaway is that fee transparency and fraud monitoring — once the ceiling of regulatory expectation — are now the floor. States are legislating past disclosure into design.
What to Watch Next
The open question is momentum. Florida, New Hampshire, and now South Dakota have converged on refund liability, and South Dakota has added a transaction cap on top. If the next wave of state legislatures adopts the same combination — registration, a hard daily limit, and a refund duty — the industry will face a de facto national standard assembled state by state, without waiting for Congress.
The other unresolved variable is whether the $1,000 cap pushes scammers toward states with weaker protections, or simply fragments larger fraud attempts across more machines and days. Will a major operator challenge SB 98's cap or refund provision in court, or will the sector treat the design-level model as the settled cost of operating? The answer over the next several months will determine whether SB 98 is a South Dakota story or the outline of every state law to come.