SNAP Card Skimming Drains Millions From Food Aid Recipients as Federal Cuts Loom

Jayeleauna Lewis receives $486 on the 13th of each month through SNAP. In September, she said, the money disappeared just minutes after it arrived. Her physical EBT card stayed in her wallet, while her benefits were spent between 12:11 a.m. and 12:13 a.m. on Sept. 13 across eight stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She said she has never been to the Northeast. "I was heartbroken because that's how I feed my daughter," said Lewis, who has a 3-year-old.

Lewis said she does not know how her benefits were taken. Cybersecurity experts say she may have been a victim of skimming, in which thieves extract card information from payment terminals and use it to drain accounts. Two weeks before the theft, Lewis said, she swiped her card at a gas station to buy a Powerade.

The USDA inspector general projected that $233 million in food assistance may have been lost to theft over the past two years, largely through skimming. In most states, stolen benefits are not replaced.

The Trump administration has vowed to eliminate SNAP fraud, saying it keeps the program from serving those who need it. Kathryn Larin, a director at the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog that has examined SNAP fraud prevention for years, said federal funding cuts that began earlier this month are likely to make states' efforts to curb skimming harder. "It will increase the budgetary pressure and will make it more difficult for states to allocate funds to benefit card theft prevention," she said.

The USDA, which administers SNAP, told NPR there had been "continued inaction" against skimming long before the new funding changes were proposed. "Skimming has been plaguing recipients for years, and States sat idly, allowing benefits to be stolen from those who need them," the department said in a statement, adding that the administrative funding changes should not make fighting skimming harder.

Scott Schober, chief executive of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, who has invented several skimming detectors, said the magnetic stripe on SNAP cards does a poor job of securing personal information. The pattern is typically this: while a cashier is distracted, a skimming device is secretly placed on a payment terminal, capturing card data that thieves later use to clone cards. Stolen food benefits are usually spent on goods that resell easily, such as baby formula. "So it's a very quick ecosystem from the point of stealing the card to drain," Schober said. "Sometimes it's within hours. It's that well-orchestrated."

Skimming first emerged more than two decades ago. Most U.S. banks have since upgraded debit and credit cards with microchips that make personal information harder to copy, while SNAP has lagged in making the switch. Michael Peck, an assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Criminal Investigative Division, who oversees the agency's skimming investigations, said organized criminal rings time their theft to the start of each month, when benefits arrive. "These transnational organized crime groups are coming into the U.S. specifically to target our benefits system," he said. "They know they're stealing from the poor."

Christopher Branch, a part-time Walmart employee from Illinois, said he has experienced both credit card and food stamp theft. His bank refunded the money he lost, but the food benefits he used to feed himself and his two children were never recovered. During the month he went without the assistance, he said, he took side jobs such as fixing cars to afford groceries. "I was very upset and disappointed," he said. "I couldn't get no type of help." Debit and credit card holders are reimbursed for unauthorized transactions under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act, while stolen SNAP benefits are not replaced in most states, according to NPR News.