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“EBT card theft is a huge, huge problem,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a sponsor on the bill. “In New York alone, in the first six months of last year, $14 million of SNAP benefits were stolen,” he added, citing City Limits’ previous reporting.
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In front of a packed auditorium at a senior center in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown Wednesday, Mr. Lee, dressed in a suit and tie, shared through an interpreter how someone cloned his Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card last year, stole his food stamp funds, and left him with just 14 cents for the month.
Mr. Lee’s story is not unique in the city, or nationally. In New York alone, as City Limits previously reported, thousands of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) users have been victims of what is known as “skimming”—in which thieves use hidden electronic devices at checkout machines to steal people’s card information.
At the senior center, flanked by two orange dancing dragons used during recent Chinese New Year celebrations, Congressman Dan Goldman, a local Democrat, introduced a bill to equip EBT cards across the country with security chips—like most modern debit or credit cards—to curb the wave of benefit losses due to card skimming.
“EBT card theft is a huge, huge problem,” Goldman said. “In New York alone, in the first six months of last year, $14 million of SNAP benefits were stolen,” he added, citing City Limits previous findings.
Nationally, an estimated $555 million in SNAP funds are vulnerable to theft in the coming years if officials don’t boost cybersecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Inspector General.
“We get these complaints all the time to our office,” Goldman said.
He and New York Republican Congressman Mike Lawler are co-sponsors of the Enhanced Cybersecurity for SNAP Act, which has bipartisan support and four current sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ron Wyden of Oregon, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy introduced it in the U.S. Senate.
Under the bill, the federal government would pay the total costs for upgrading EBT cards. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the SNAP program, would be required to overhaul its security standards for food assistance, transitioning all SNAP participants from outdated magnetic stripe cards to fraud-resistant chip technology within five years. It would also require states to provide free replacement cards within three days to people whose cards are stolen, cloned, or malfunctioning.
“The security on the EBT cards has not been modernized since 2010,” Goldman said. Security chips, he added, are “a very common and easy way of keeping our cards and our identification information much more secure.”
To the misfortune of the people who are currently scammed, there’s no way for them to recover their losses after the federal government ended its reimbursement period at the end of 2024.
In the absence of meaningful action at the federal level, some states have stepped in. Last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a statewide upgrade of EBT cards, which should roll out in February 2027, state officials said during a recent budget hearing.
Civil rights groups also filed an appeal in a lawsuit last month that is trying to compel the federal government to replace people’s stolen SNAP benefits.
Goldman’s office did not provide an estimate of the costs of implementing the bill. But the amount of funding being stolen from SNAP users, they said, would outpace what gets spent on upgrading their cards.
The bill was welcomed by anti-hunger groups nationwide. “SNAP skimming is the ultimate lose-lose: taking groceries away from the most vulnerable Americans while losing tax funds to criminal syndicates,” said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America.
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