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How Scammers are Stealing Millions Using Crypto ATMs; Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD): DOJ to Ask Grand Jury to Indict John Bolton Today; Trump Says He and Putin Agree to Meet in Budapest. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired October 16, 2025 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:30:00]
BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Americans are losing millions of dollars to a crypto ATM scam. The con often starts with a text or an e-mail falsely claiming that victims owe money. CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah actually confronted one scammer just as he was trying to steal thousands of dollars from her.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SCAMMER: You need to withdraw $9,500 from your account.
KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voiceover): What am I doing with thousands in cash in a car? You are watching a scam.
SCAMMER: See you are talking to the Geek Squad from the Best Buy.
LAH (voiceover): And this is a scammer trying to steal money from me.
LAH: This is a mistake.
LAH (voiceover): You've probably gotten fake bills or spam texts. We decided to call one. It appeared to be a U.S. phone number on the official looking bill that was emailed by the con artists.
SCAMMER: Can you tell me your refund amount once again?
LAH (voiceover): He promises to help, sending me a form to fill out.
[14:35:00]
LAH: It says Geek Squad cancellation and refund form. Excellent!
LAH (voiceover): Here's how this scam works. In order to get my refund, he says I need to let him remote control my computer, which for the purposes of this scam, I let him.
SCAMMER: You are connected. So, like, you need to accept the refund, OK? Once it will ask you for the amount, give a dollar sign then one, zero, zero. That's it, OK?
LAH: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. What happened? That says $10,000.
SCAMMER: Oh my God. I told you please don't make any mistake.
LAH (voiceover): The lie is that this company refunded me too much money, and I must send it back to avoid committing a crime.
SCAMMER: This is an illegal fund. You need to transfer that money back to our company. You need to go to your bank, OK, and you need to withdraw $9,500 from your account. While you're driving you don't have to talk to me, and you don't have to talk to me inside the bank as well.
LAH (voiceover): After I pull out the cash he wants to see proof.
SCAMMER: Take a picture.
LAH: Take a picture of the money?
SCAMMER: Yes. Yes, it's good.
LAH (voiceover): Here is the modern twist in the scam. The scammer tells me where to go to find something called a crypto ATM where I can deposit the money.
SCAMMER: There will be a yellow-colored ATM machine.
LAH: A yellow-colored ATM machine.
SCAMMER: Open up the camera. You need to deposit that cash.
LAH (voiceover): A crypto ATM looks like a normal ATM but it's different. Put in cash and it converts it into cryptocurrency in an instant. These machines become the getaway car for the scammers who prey on victims.
But back to our scammer on the phone with me.
LAH: I'm not going to put the money into the machine.
SCAMMER: Why?
LAH: Because this is a scam. You know it and I know it.
SCAMMER: Why you think like -- why you think like that?
LAH: You are talking to a reporter from CNN.
SCAMMER: Oh, so you are talk -- I am talking to the reporter.
LAH: From CNN. How much crypto money are you transferring through various electronic wallets?
SCAMMER: Like a couple of million dollars in a month.
LAH: Do you care about these people you're scamming?
SCAMMER: Yes, I do care.
LAH: You do care?
SCAMMER: Yes.
LAH: Because a lot of people are losing their life savings. Elderly people who fall for this.
SCAMMER: Oh, OK. I'm sorry about that.
LAH: Why do you keep doing it?
(CALL DISCONNECTS)
LAH: Police reports reviewed show that these scammed cash, the preponderance of it does end up overseas. A lot of that money flows into places like Africa and Southeast Asia. Experts also tell us that the people making the phone calls, like that scammer on the phone -- they're often the victims of human trafficking and are victims there of forced labor.
Kyung Lah, CNN, Los Angeles.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SANCHEZ: Our thanks to Kyung Law for that eye-opening story.
Still ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL, an indictment of former National Security Advisor John Bolton could come as soon as this afternoon. We're going to discuss with Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin when we come back.
[14:40:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SANCHEZ: Back now to the breaking news we've been following this afternoon. Sources tell CNN that the Justice Department is expected to ask a grand jury to indict former National Security Advisor and frequent target of President Trump, John Bolton. Let's discuss with Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
He is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman, thank you so much for sharing part of your afternoon with us. What is your response, your reaction to this effort by DOJ to indict Bolton?
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD), HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: Clearly part of Donald Trump's ongoing vengeance campaign. It shows you how far we've traveled politically that John Bolton is now a hero of the resistance simply for telling the truth about Donald Trump in the way that he fawns over Vladimir Putin and basically gives comfort to the autocrats and dictators of the world. So, you know, there are a bunch of very questionable investigations and prosecutions taking place.
There are several U.S. attorneys who have either resigned or been fired by Trump simply because they refuse to go along with a vengeance campaign. And, you know, this strikes me as a very problematic prosecution. But we'll have to see.
And undoubtedly, you know, it's designed also to send, you know, a message of deterrence to other people if he attempted to tell the truth what's going on there.
SANCHEZ: We haven't actually seen the evidence to your point. I think we have to wait until the indictment comes down. But if he is found to have mishandled some classified information with this AOL e-mail diary that he was keeping, and if he's charged with, say, mishandling classified information, should he be held accountable?
RASKIN: Well, everybody can see the irony of President Trump instigating a prosecution against Bolton for mishandling classified information, which, of course, that's what the Jack Smith investigation was about with respect to Donald Trump, where he knowingly took lots of classified information -- to return it back when it was taken from him.
[14:45:00]
And still the Department of Justice has not released the Jack Smith special investigator, or rather special counsel report that was done on the matter. So we would like them to come clean on that to, you know, divulge everything that happened there.
But your point is correct, which is that we don't know anything about whatever evidence they may have against him or not. But we do know what the motivation for the prosecution is.
It's because he crossed Donald Trump.
SANCHEZ: Given the seeming questions that you might have for Jack Smith, I wonder if you're in agreement with Chairman Jim Jordan about having, like many other special counsels before him, Jack Smith come before the committee and answer questions publicly.
RASKIN: Yes, indeed. I would like him to do it publicly. Jordan subpoenaed him to come behind closed doors because, of course, they're afraid of what Jack Smith's testimony would do, because that guy is a by-the-book, down-the-line actual prosecutor.
He applies the law to the facts of the case. He is not a political henchman and a sycophant, the kind of people they've been gathering in the Department of Justice. They've fired dozens of career prosecutors, including anybody who worked on the January 6th prosecution.
So I would be for a public hearing. And I'm also for releasing Jack Smith's report, the one that the MAGA Justice Department has been suppressing from the beginning. So we can see exactly what he had to say about what Donald Trump did with respect to all of the classified documents that went missing.
SANCHEZ: Congressman, I'm sure you've been following. There's been a lot of breaking news this afternoon. So I do want to pivot and ask you about President Trump's conversation with Vladimir Putin today before he meets with Volodymyr Zelenskyy tomorrow. Obviously, news coming that the president wants to meet with Putin at an unannounced, at this point, date in Budapest, Hungary. This comes two months to the day that the two leaders met in Alaska without much of a difference coming to the actual war in Ukraine. Are you anticipating that this is a positive development?
RASKIN: Well, this war needs to end. It needs to end basically in the reverse way it began. Vladimir Putin's got to get the hell out of Ukraine and stop killing civilians there.
And Donald Trump needs to establish some moral and geopolitical clarity about that. I mean, he invited Vladimir Putin, who's a war criminal, to come to the United States, to Alaska. Yes, Alaska is part of the United States, although Trump was treating it like it was part of a foreign country.
And we got nothing out of that. I hope that there are people working with the president who will actually lay the groundwork for the demand that Putin disengage and withdraw.
Ukraine, President Zelenskyy, the people of that country are our allies. They are democratic allies against an authoritarian, imperialist aggressor who has been attacking civilians, kidnapping thousands of children from Ukraine, attacking civilian sites like apartment buildings and schools and you name it. And we basically should only be meeting with him to tell him he needs to get out. And so I don't know exactly what President Trump has in mind.
Some days he talks very tough about Putin, and that's good. It's like he's back on our side. But other times he makes it sound like he and Putin are working together and we should not be on the side of the autocrats of the world.
SANCHEZ: A quick question, Congressman, do you support sending Tomahawks to Ukraine?
RASKIN: But I support getting them all of the military armaments that they need in order to defeat the invasion. And if that's something that President Zelenskyy is asking for and that's needed to repel the invasion, that's something I would be in favor of.
SANCHEZ: Understood. And finally, we're in day 16 of a government shutdown. We have Senate Majority Leader John Thune saying that he's willing to guarantee a vote on expiring Obamacare subsidies by a certain date.
Is that enough assurance for you to support an ending to the shutdown?
RASKIN: Well, look, I'll let Senator Schumer and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, you know, issue whatever response that they want. I mean, I stand with, I think, every Democrat in the House of Representatives.
[14:50:00]
And I believe the vast majority in the Senate saying that we've got to end this shutdown by saving the health care of the American people. They go together and we're going to do these things at the exact same time. Because we cannot be throwing millions of people off of their monthly premium insurance credits that they've gotten through the ACA plan to help people pay for their monthly health insurance. We can't throw people off of Medicaid and they want to throw millions of people off of Medicaid as they effectuated a $1 trillion cut almost to (INAUDIBLE) pay for their insurance.
So we've got to deal with all of this together. And this is not a time for gotcha resolutions and game playing. This is a time for everybody to sit down together to reopen the government, to reopen our federal functions and to restore health care to the American people.
And the public opinion polls show that we've got massive support in advancing those agendas.
SANCHEZ: Congressman Jamie Raskin, we appreciate you sharing your time and perspective -- Brianna
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Now to some of the other headlines that we're watching this hour. Hundreds of people in southwestern Alaska are being evacuated from their villages today following the remnants of a devastating typhoon that ravaged coastal communities and swept away homes. Across the region, more than 1,500 people were displaced by the storm and many homes may not be livable by winter.
Record water levels topped more than six feet above the highest normal tide line and officials say at least one person was killed and two are still missing.
Also, Kenyan security forces firing gunshots and releasing tear gas earlier today to disperse thousands of mourners gathering to view the body of its former prime minister, Raila Odinga. Video shows chaotic scenes of a stampede at the gates of the soccer stadium in Nairobi where the viewing took place.
Odinga served as prime minister of Kenya from 2008 to 2013. He died Wednesday at the age of 80 after collapsing during a morning walk.
And it was quite the scare for a couple of pets who were home alone in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A dog named Colton nearly setting their home on fire after chewing on that device that contained a lithium ion battery. Once the fire started, both pets just shot up the stairs to safety. You see that there.
The home not damaged. Pets were not harmed as the fire never ended up spreading. But the homeowner is a firefighter and he posted video of what happened to show the importance of correctly charging and storing items that contain lithium ion batteries.
Cute pup there.
All right, coming up, we have some new reporting on the role that TikTok is playing for some of the roughly one million federal employees who are furloughed or working without pay. We'll have that next. [14:55:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SANCHEZ: Reality is setting in for federal employees, especially those being forced to show up to work without being paid. Now, some are taking their frustration to TikTok. The #federalemployees has racked up nearly 10,000 posts on the app.
Of course, not all of them are from federal employees, but the surge in content shows how TikTok has become an outlet for workers in limbo.
CNN tech reporter Clare Duffy joins U.S. now. So, Clare, tell U.S. what these posts are about.
CLARE DUFFY, CNN TECH REPORTER: Yes, Boris, I mean, we've seen this budget fight mostly play out on this very high level among lawmakers on Capitol Hill. And TikTok has emerged as this sort of window into what it's like to be a government worker right now who is affected by this shutdown. And as you said, this trend is growing rapidly.
We are seeing government workers post TikToks that are like a day in my life as a furloughed federal worker or talking about their grocery shopping trips having to change as they're pulling back on their spending while they're not getting a paycheck.
There are also some federal workers who are using this as an opportunity to correct misconceptions about government work or what the shutdown means for them.
I spoke with one government worker, Ashton. He's an air traffic controller. And he said that he's been addressing questions that are in his comments about why he can't just stop showing up to work as an air traffic controller, even though he's not getting paid right now.
I also spoke with Aubrey. She works in public health for the government. She told me, "I really want people to see that federal workers are real people and their lives are being impacted. I felt like no one was -- no one was hearing or seeing us."
And of course, there are some folks who are also hoping that TikTok could be an avenue to make a little bit of extra money as they have no timeline for when their next paycheck is coming through.
But I do think this speaks to just how powerful a tool TikTok has become for people to find information, not just from journalists like you or I, but also from real people who are impacted by these kinds of news events -- Boris.
SANCHEZ: Clare Duffy, thank you so much for that report.
The next hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts right now.
KEILAR: A second summit. President Trump says he's agreed to meet face-to-face with Russia's Vladimir Putin again in hopes of ending the war in Ukraine. And ordered to testify. A federal judge wants answers from the ICE
field director in Chicago, after ...
[15:00:00]
