EBT Skimming Drains Millions From SNAP Recipients

Card skimming targeting the debit-style cards that deliver food assistance has become a leading source of fraud against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, robbing low-income Americans of hundreds of millions of dollars while leaving most victims with no way to recover their stolen benefits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General projected that roughly $233 million may have been lost to food assistance theft over the past two years alone, driven largely by skimming. In most states, that money is never replaced.

A System Built on Outdated Technology

SNAP benefits are distributed through Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, which rely on magnetic stripes that security experts say are easily copied. Most U.S. bank cards were upgraded years ago with microchips that make cloning far harder, but the food assistance program lagged behind — a gap organized crime rings learned to exploit.

“These transnational organized crime groups are coming into the U.S. specifically to target our benefits system,” Michael Peck, an assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division, told NPR. “They know they’re stealing from the poor.”

The mechanics are straightforward. When a cashier is distracted, fraudsters secretly place a skimming device on a payment terminal. The device captures card data that thieves later use to clone cards, often timing the theft to the start of each month when benefits arrive and mass-purchasing items that resell easily, such as baby formula.

“So it’s a very quick ecosystem from the point of stealing the card to drain,” said Scott Schober, chief executive of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, who has invented several skimming detectors. “Sometimes it’s within hours. It’s that well-orchestrated.”

The Human Cost

For recipients, the losses are immediate and often devastating. Jayeleauna Lewis, a 20-year-old single mother from Indiana, receives $486 a month in SNAP benefits. In September, minutes after her funds were loaded, they vanished — spent across eight stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania between 12:11 a.m. and 12:13 a.m., even as her physical card remained in her wallet.

“I was heartbroken because that’s how I feed my daughter,” she said.

Anti-hunger advocates say part of what makes the theft so striking is the double standard compared with other fraud victims. Debit and credit holders are reimbursed for unauthorized transactions under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act, but in 1996 Congress voted to exclude SNAP recipients from those protections, citing cost concerns, according to a 2025 report by the Government Accountability Office.

The federal government temporarily filled that gap, replacing more than $320 million in stolen benefits for nearly 670,000 households between October 2022 and December 2024. But Congress let that authority lapse at the end of 2024, and no federal recourse now remains.

A 2026 survey by Propel, an app that helps users track their SNAP balances, found that a majority of theft victims skipped or ate fewer meals, nearly half borrowed money or went into debt, and more than a third struggled to pay bills or rent.

“That’s the real kind of human cost of SNAP benefits being stolen,” said Propel chief executive Jimmy Chen.

California Offers a Model

In early 2025, California became the first state to begin issuing chip-enabled EBT cards. The results were striking: the state reported an 83% decline in reported EBT theft since January 2024. It also deployed forced PIN resets that cut theft among compromised cardholders, a predictive machine-learning model that automatically identifies theft, and an app allowing users to freeze their cards and block out-of-state transactions.

Yet California remains an outlier. Fewer than a third of states have upgraded or plan to upgrade their EBT cards, according to the USDA. In 2024, the X9.58-2024 standard enabling chip EBT cards was formally published, but nationwide adoption has been slow.

Much of the delay comes down to money. The GAO found that chip-enabled cards cost about 10 times more to produce than magnetic-stripe cards, with initial state transition costs ranging from $2 million to $11.5 million. The USDA supports chip adoption but provides limited funding — last year it awarded just seven states a combined $5 million to address fraud.

Funding Cuts Compound the Problem

Starting this month, states have fewer federal dollars to run the food assistance program altogether. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut federal funding for states’ operational costs by half while requiring SNAP agencies to reduce payment error rates or face penalties.

At least five states have said they plan to delay issuing chip cards or related investments because of the funding changes, according to NPR, citing a survey by the American Public Human Services Association and the Urban Institute.

“The likelihood of states being able to switch to chip-tap technology without federal support is going to be even more less likely,” said Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center.

The USDA pushed back, telling NPR that skimming “has been plaguing recipients for years, and States sat idly, allowing benefits to be stolen from those who need them,” adding that funding changes should not make it harder to fight skimming.

Momentum in the States and Congress

Some states are moving ahead regardless. In June, Ohio lawmakers passed bipartisan bills requiring the state to begin issuing chip-enabled EBT cards, committing $3 million to launch the effort. Ohio SNAP recipients have lost more than $17 million to theft since 2022, according to News 5 Cleveland.

“That gets us started,” said Rep. Tristan Rader, a Lakewood Democrat who helped lead the push. “It’s a relatively small amount of money to fix a relatively big hole in the ship.”

In Washington, the Senate version of the Farm Bill includes a provision to move toward chip-enabled cards, but the House version does not. Congress remains deadlocked over SNAP more broadly, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties on states with high payment error rates.

“The conversation about boosting cybersecurity standards is hard to make as long as Republicans refuse to restore the food assistance,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has pushed for more secure EBT cards since the Biden administration. “What I’m committed to doing is getting both of these over the finish line.”

What to Watch

With federal reimbursement gone, the burden of protecting benefits increasingly falls on individual recipients — changing PINs monthly, locking cards between purchases, or tugging on payment terminals to check for tampering. Advocates note those steps can be difficult for people without smartphones.

The USDA has yet to finalize a federal rule, directed by Congress in late 2022, that would force states to update their cards; the Office of Inspector General has said it is not expected before the end of September 2026. Whether the chip-card provision survives in the final Farm Bill — and whether states receive the funding to act on it — will determine how quickly the nation’s most vulnerable shoppers stop being the easiest targets for organized theft.