​​Last August, Linda Kay Simmons frantically drove to a gas station — her 6-year-old granddaughter in the back seat — to feed thousands of dollars into a cryptocurrency ATM. Two men claiming to be sheriff’s deputies had called earlier that day to warn she could face arrest for evading grand jury duty if she didn’t deposit the cash as a bail bond.

The men demanded she stay on the phone, but concern for her granddaughter spurred the 71-year-old author from Moneta, Virginia, to borrow a phone from a stranger to call her daughter. Simmons ended up feeding close to $16,000 into the machine before her daughter arrived and convinced her it was a scam. 

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