In Brief:
- Thieves stole at least $320 million of benefits from SNAP recipients from October 2022-December 2024. A federal office predicts they could steal another $233 million in FY 25 and FY 26 unless payments are made more secure.
- Many of these thefts occur because EBT cards lack certain payment security features that help prevent card skimming and cloning.
- Last year, California became the first state to adopt those features, replacing easy-to-skim magnetic stripe cards with chip tap-and-pay-enabled cards. Several other states are now following suit.
Last year’s federal tax bill put renewed focus on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding and eligibility. But all the time and dollars put into administering and funding the program are wasted if the intended recipients have their nutrition benefits stolen before they can ever use them.
Too easily, thieves can exploit the weak security features of the electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards that residents use to buy food with SNAP. SNAP recipients may only discover they’ve been robbed when they try to pay for groceries at the store and are told their accounts are empty. The federal government doesn’t reimburse EBT theft victims for the loss, and most states won’t either.
“When you think of all the parties in this — Congress, FNS [Food and Nutrition Service], states, EBT vendors, retailers — the truest of victims are the households,” says Ed Bolen, director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “They did nothing wrong. They went to the store and they bought groceries for their families, and they’re the ones left holding the entire bag.”
From Oct. 1, 2022, to Dec. 20, 2024, at least $320 million of SNAP benefits were stolen, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO says this is likely an undercount due to underreporting, and the true number is likely higher. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Inspector General estimates that if new security measures aren’t adopted, $233 million more could be stolen in FY 25 and FY 26.
The good news? As Bolen says, “It’s a solvable problem.”
Commercial credit and debit card companies began adopting more security features back in 2015 to protect against skimming, the same kind of theft affecting EBT cards.
The federal government never required EBT cards to follow suit. But a handful of states have gone ahead.
In 2025, California became the only state in the U.S. to switch from more vulnerable magnetic stripe EBT cards to more secure ones with embedded computer chips. The state reports that reimbursements for stolen EBT funds declined 83 percent from January 2024 to November 2025 as a result of the more secure EBT cards in combination with other security efforts.
Other states followed. As of January 2026, Oklahoma is now issuing chip-enabled EBT cards, and Alabama began rolling out its own last month. Maryland and New York plan to do the same. (Meanwhile, Massachusetts, Illinois and Oklahoma are piloting mobile payment, which also avoids the risk of benefit theft via skimming. Other states are taking steps like preventing cardholders from setting easy-to-guess PINs or establishing a unit dedicated to investigating benefit trafficking.)
A ‘Solvable’ Problem
EBT cards are so prone to theft because most of them use old-fashioned technology that criminals know how to thwart.
EBT cards are printed with magnetic stripes containing payment information. Thieves sneak unobtrusive devices called “card skimmers” into retailers’ point-of-sale devices so that, when the cardholder swipes to check out, their card runs through the skimmer, which reads and stores the payment details.
Thieves will circle back to remove the skimmers and can copy victims’ card details onto blank cards. That lets them use the stolen SNAP benefits to make bulk purchases of items they can easily resell, like baby formula, energy bars and cooking oil, or exchange benefits for cash with complicit retailers. (Criminals also steal other benefits issued to EBT cards, which can include cash aid for low-income families.)
In 2015, commercial debit and credit card companies began shifting to chip-embedded cards, which are better protected against skimming.
Unlike magnetic stripe payment cards, chip cards tapped or inserted at a point-of-sale device do not share all the card’s sensitive payment information. Instead, chip cards create single-use codes to enable the particular transaction at hand; thieves could not use a stolen code to authorize a later transaction.
A Federal Rule in the Works
The federal government is also considering such a shift. A new bill would require states to move SNAP recipients onto chip-enabled EBT cards and require retailers to accept these cards. Financial penalties levied on EBT fraudsters would go toward reimbursing theft victims.
The executive branch could also take action via regulatory requirements. In 2024, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) released a technical standard for how states could issue chip-enabled cards. But while FNS has “describe[d] security measures that can be implemented to detect and prevent benefit theft,” it has yet to require states to take up these measures, per the Office of Inspector General.
FNS has been working to draft such a requirement since spring 2024, and expects to publish it by the end of September 2026.
Bolen says the technical standard doesn’t cover every decision states need to take to implement chip-enabled cards, and some states may be wary of acting without further guidance.
“A lot of states are waiting to understand, so that they don’t lock into something that when these regulations come out they’re noncompliant,” Bolen says.
California Goes Chip
Between January and April 2025, California mailed out 4.4 million chip-and-tap-enabled cards to replace old magnetic stripe ones. The state began issuing the chip cards to all new cardholders as of February 2025, the California Department of Social Services said in an email.
Between this and other security methods, EBT theft has gone down. California reimbursed EBT theft victims over $8 million for stolen food benefits in January 2024, a figure that dropped closer to $1 million by November 2025. (And cash benefits thefts had dropped from roughly $13 million to below $4 million.)
The shift to chip-enabled cards has some challenges. Bolen says some Californians receiving the new cards didn’t get the information in a language they understood, and some may have believed it was a scam.
Chip-enabled cards also cost more to print than magnetic stripe cards. A federal report found magstripe EBT cards cost 20-40 cents each while chip-enabled tap-to-pay cards can cost $2.31-$4.99 each. The California Department of Social Services says it spent $44 million in state and county funds and $32 million in federal funding making the transition. This included paying for new card printing equipment and replacing existing cards, among other expenses.
Retailers, in turn, must update the code of their point-of-sale devices to enable EBT tap-to-pay. (And financial institutions must update their ATMs to allow the new EBT cards to be used to withdraw cash aid.) Still, California’s new chip-enabled cards retain the magnetic stripes, something that’s federally required, which allows customers to revert to swiping their card if needed at a particular retailer.
The shift is a work in progress. As of December 2025, more than half of EBT card transactions “occurred through a mechanism that is not vulnerable to skimming,” per the department.
In addition to switching to chip-enabled cards, California created an app and website where benefit recipients can manage their cards — such as changing their PINs, blocking out-of-state purchases and freezing card transactions whenever they’re not actively trying to make a purchase. Additionally, the state began forcing PIN resets for people whose card information was compromised and added card verification values (CVVs) to cards for greater security.
So far, the results are promising, but it’ll take more state and federal action to keep the nation’s SNAP recipients safe.
“It is devastating for a low-income family to find they can’t afford groceries because some criminals stole their benefits,” Bolen says.
