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It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?
When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.
In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.
It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.
To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.
The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)
ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.
Rita Harper for ProPublicaMy Food Stamps Were Stolen: Jared Chesnut
The Particulars: $893, Hoover, Alabama, December 2025
Why I Receive SNAP: I’d been let go from my job as a software developer — and trying to find work in that field has been very tricky lately, with AI and everything. I later got an overnight gig at Walmart, but I had to apply for SNAP temporarily.
How I Found Out: I was in the checkout line. My card kept declining. So I had to just leave everything I’d had in my cart. But the cashier and the guy behind me were sweet; they said they were sorry I had to go through this.
How It Affected Me: It was approaching Christmas. I was about to get together with my family and was planning to bake a dessert. But I couldn’t afford to. I ate rice and grits the rest of the month.
Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”
Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.
SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.
Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.
EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.
“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.
Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.
Tina Russell for ProPublicaMy Food Stamps Were Stolen: Adrianna Puckett
The Particulars: $516, Oak Hill, Florida, July 2026
Why I Receive SNAP: I have two kids: a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old. I was working at a gas station, but then I went on maternity leave. My husband happened to get hurt at work at the same time.
How I Found Out: I went on the app and saw the transactions. The EBT people kept asking me: “Are you sure you’re not in California? Or you didn’t give your card to someone in California?” And I was like: “No, why would I do that? I’m trying to use it here in Florida.”
How It Affected Me: It was devastating. It was just the worst time that this could have happened. I had to go back to work full time with a newborn.
The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.
In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.
In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.
SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.
That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.
The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)
State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.
All the while, that law has cut food aid for more than 1.2 million children. The USDA’s Rollins has said that nearly 6 million people in total have been “moved off SNAP” during the current administration.
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