The kiosks, and the ban

January 2025 — March 9, 2026

Where South Bend actually met crypto: For most residents the city's cryptocurrency infrastructure was never an app or an exchange; it was a kiosk in a store. Coinme-powered Coinstar machines and their competitors sold Bitcoin for cash in grocery and convenience stores across Indiana — the Legislative Services Agency's fiscal note on the 2026 kiosk bill estimated 903 virtual currency kiosks operating in Indiana as of January 2025 — and machines of the same kind became, across the country, the payment rail of the impersonation scam: a caller posing as an officer, a bank, or a utility directs a frightened victim to withdraw cash and feed it into a bitcoin ATM, from which it cannot be recovered. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center put the national loss through the machines at more than $333 million in 2025 alone.

Indiana ends them first: House Bill 1116 began in the 2026 session as a licensing regime — Rep. Wendy McNamara of Evansville wrote it to impose licensing, transaction limits, and fee caps — and a Senate committee amendment, carried by Sen. Scott Baldwin, converted it into an outright prohibition on operating a virtual currency kiosk in Indiana. The amended bill passed the Senate 45–0; the House concurred 93–1. Governor Mike Braun signed House Enrolled Act 1116 on March 9, 2026, and the ban took effect immediately, its violations actionable under the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act. Indiana was the first state in the nation to ban the machines outright — Tennessee and Minnesota followed within months — and in October 2026 Coinme, the largest kiosk operator, settled with thirty-four state regulators and agreed to end its kiosk business by January 1, 2027. The local layer elsewhere in Indiana had been municipal — Evansville's Ordinance G-2025-19 of September 2025 regulated the machines there a season before the state acted — but no South Bend kiosk ordinance, and no count of the machines that stood in this city, appears in the record reached; South Bend's documented kiosk history is the statewide one, and its documented end is March 9, 2026.

Sources:

1. Indiana Legislative Services Agency, fiscal note on House Bill 1116 (2026) — an estimated 903 virtual currency kiosks operating in Indiana as of January 2025.
2. Indiana Capital Chronicle (February 11, 2026) and Evansville Courier & Press (February 20, 2026) — the bill's conversion from licensing to ban, the Senate's 45–0 vote, the House's 93–1 concurrence, and Evansville's Ordinance G-2025-19 of September 2025.
3. AARP Indiana (March 10, 2026) — Governor Braun's March 9, 2026 signing of House Enrolled Act 1116; Indiana the first state to ban the kiosks; the FBI IC3 figure of more than $333 million stolen through kiosks in 2025.
4. Legal analyses of House Enrolled Act 1116 (Sheppard Mullin; Orrick, March 2026) — the prohibition's immediate effect and its enforcement under the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act.
5. Coinme / Coinstar kiosk network descriptions and the October 2026 multi-state settlement coverage (ICBA; ABA Banking Journal) — the cash-for-Bitcoin kiosk network and Coinme's agreement to end kiosk operations by January 1, 2027.