As Jayeleauna Lewis listened to an automated voice system describe the unauthorized charges on her food assistance card, a pit formed in her stomach. She pictured her 3-year-old daughter and their empty fridge back home.
On the 13th of each month, Lewis, a 20-year-old single mom from Indiana, receives $486 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP. But in September, just minutes after funds were loaded onto her account, they disappeared.
" I was heartbroken because that's how I feed my daughter," she says.
Lewis is unsure how her benefits were stolen, but cybersecurity experts say she might have been a victim of skimming — when thieves extract card information from payment terminals and drain money from accounts.
In recent years, SNAP has become a fraud magnet for criminals who view both the nation's poorest Americans and the government program's outdated technology as easy to exploit. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General projected that, over the past two years alone, $233 million may have been lost due to food assistance theft — largely driven by skimming. And in most states, stolen benefits are not replaced.
The Trump administration has vowed to eliminate SNAP fraud, adding that it's preventing the program from serving those who truly need it. But states' efforts to curb skimming are likely to get harder due to federal funding cuts that began earlier this month, according to Kathryn Larin, a director at the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency that has been examining SNAP fraud prevention efforts for years.
"It will increase the budgetary pressure and will make it more difficult for states to allocate funds to benefit card theft prevention," she says.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, told NPR there had been "continued inaction" against skimming long before 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. SNAP administrative funding changes should not make it harder to fight skimming, as it simply holds these complaining lawmakers accountable," according to a statement from the USDA.
'They know they're stealing from the poor'
Lewis says she has never been to the Northeast. But on Sept. 13, between 12:11 a.m. and 12:13 a.m., her benefits were spent across eight stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, her physical food assistance card, also known as an EBT card, remained tucked in her wallet.
Two weeks earlier, Lewis says she had swiped her card at a gas station to buy a Powerade. Swipe-pay is vulnerable to theft because the magnetic stripe behind cards does a poor job of securing personal information, according to Scott Schober, the CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems who has invented several skimming detectors.
It typically goes like this: When a cashier is distracted, fraudsters secretly place a skimming device onto a payment terminal. The device captures troves of card information, which thieves later collect in order to clone cards. With stolen food benefits, criminals typically mass-purchase items that are easy to resell, such as baby formula.
"So it's a very quick ecosystem from the point of stealing the card to drain," Schober says. "Sometimes it's within hours. It's that well-orchestrated."
Skimming first emerged over two decades ago. Most banks in the U.S. have since upgraded their debit and credit cards with microchips that make it harder to copy personal information. SNAP, on the other hand, has lagged in making the switch. Organized criminal rings caught on and zeroed in on food stamp recipients — often timing their theft to the start of each month when benefits arrive, according to Michael Peck, an assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Criminal Investigative Division. Peck oversees the agency's skimming investigations.
"These transnational organized crime groups are coming into the U.S. specifically to target our benefits system," he says. "They know they're stealing from the poor."
The 'human cost' of stolen benefits
Anti-hunger advocates say part of what makes food assistance theft striking is the double standard compared to other victims of fraud.
Christopher Branch, a part-time Walmart employee from Illinois, says he has experienced both credit card and food stamp theft before. While his bank refunded him for the money he lost, the food benefits he used to feed himself and his two children were never recovered. During the month without his food assistance, Branch says he had to take on side jobs such as fixing cars to afford groceries.
" I was very upset and disappointed," he says. "I couldn't get no type of help."
Debit and credit holders are reimbursed for unauthorized transactions under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act. In 1996, Congress voted to exclude SNAP recipients from receiving those same protections due to concerns that it would be too costly, according to a 2025 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The federal government temporarily replaced more than $320 million in stolen benefits for nearly 670,000 households between October 2022 and December 2024 — giving some insight into the scale of this type of fraud.
But now, there's no federal recourse — so when food assistance disappears, SNAP recipients are forced to make difficult choices. Earlier this year, Propel, an app that helps users check their SNAP balance, surveyed individuals who said they were victims of SNAP theft. A majority of respondents said they skipped or ate fewer meals as a result. Nearly half said they borrowed money or went into debt, while more than a third said they struggled to pay their bills or rent.
"That's the real kind of human cost of SNAP benefits being stolen," says Jimmy Chen, the CEO of Propel.
Then, there's shame. After Mary Barclay from Massachusetts saw her food assistance vanish, she recalled her SNAP caseworker faulting her for not taking more security precautions, like locking her EBT card. When Barclay went to the police, she says her story was met with skepticism.
"They made me feel as if I had something to do with it," she says.
'It can't all be arrests'
In early 2025, California became the first state to start issuing chip-enabled EBT cards. It wasn't a silver bullet, but over the next several months, the state reported a consistent and rapid decline in SNAP theft.
So far, fewer than a third of states have upgraded or plan to upgrade their EBT cards, according to the USDA. States are addressing skimming in other ways, but most of them put the burden on SNAP recipients to be hypervigilant — like changing their card's PIN number on a monthly basis or keeping their cards locked until they're ready to make a purchase.
"It can be difficult for some people to do that if you don't have a cellphone, for example, that has the app that allows you to do the locking," says Larin from the GAO.
On the law enforcement side, federal and state authorities are working to find and remove skimming devices. But Secret Service agent Peck says operations alone can't solve this problem.
"The issue we run into is the fact that the groups that conduct this fraud aren't afraid to go right back to a store and install again," he says.
Funding challenges have compounded
The biggest barrier to chip-enabled cards is cost.
In a report published last year, the GAO found that chip-enabled cards are about 10 times more expensive to produce than magnetic strip ones. The initial transition alone can cost states millions of dollars upfront.
The USDA supports chip adoption, but it provides limited funds to help states do so. For instance, last year, the department awarded seven states a combined total of $5 million to address fraud.
Starting this month, states have fewer federal dollars to operate the food assistance program altogether. That's because of President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut federal funding for states' operational costs by half. At the same time, the law requires state SNAP agencies to focus on reducing their payment error rate — which is a measure of overpayments and underpayments to SNAP recipients — or they'll face harsh financial penalties.
Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director for the Food Research & Action Center, says these changes will make it harder for states to combat skimming.
" The likelihood of states being able to switch to chip-tap technology without federal support is going to be even more less likely," she says.
At least five states have said they plan to delay issuing chip cards or related investments as a result of the federal funding changes, according to a survey conducted by the American Public Human Services Association and the Urban Institute earlier this year.
Congress considers mandating chip-enabled cards nationwide. Will it happen?
While modernizing SNAP may be costly and slow, the country has done it before. When states switched from paper food stamps to electronic benefits in the early 2000s, it was largely driven by a desire to prevent food stamps from getting lost, stolen or sold. They did so through federal legislation.
In recent years, Congress has introduced legislation to upgrade EBT cards nationwide or replace stolen food benefits. Right now, the Senate version of the Farm Bill, which provides funding for an array of programs, includes a provision to move toward chips. But the House version does not, meaning it's unclear if the measure will make the final cut. Although the program has bipartisan support, Congress is at a major impasse over SNAP — in particular, the hundreds of millions of dollars possibly imposed 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," says Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has been pushing for more secure EBT cards since the Biden administration. " What I'm committed to doing is getting both of these over the finish line."
Back in Indiana, Lewis' stolen food assistance has had a ripple effect. Her mother, Johna Hammontree, says she typically lives paycheck to paycheck, but has been stretching every dollar to ensure her daughter and granddaughter do not go hungry.
"It's really, really rough for me already," Hammontree says. "But I will take from my rent money, my bill money, my grocery money … Whatever I need to pull from financially to make sure that she's okay."
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