Lawmakers and community leaders gathered on the steps of City Hall to sound the alarm over a sharp rise in the theft of SNAP food benefits and the toll it is taking on New Yorkers who rely on them. Officials said nearly 3 million SNAP recipients across the state remain vulnerable to having their benefits stolen, largely because of the outdated cards still being used to deliver the assistance.
At the heart of the problem is a form of fraud that has grown harder to stop. The theft most commonly occurs through skimming schemes, in which criminals capture the information stored on a recipient's EBT card and then use it to drain the account. For families living close to the edge, the sudden loss of a month's grocery money can be devastating and very difficult to recover.
The scale of the losses is striking. According to the Office of the State Comptroller, New York State recorded roughly 85,000 cases of SNAP skimming between 2023 and 2024, with nearly 40 million dollars in benefits stolen over that period. The figures underscore how a crime once seen as marginal has ballooned into a multimillion-dollar drain on public assistance in the state.
The burden has not fallen evenly across the city. Officials said that since August 2023, about 60 percent of the reimbursement claims have come from just two boroughs, Brooklyn and the Bronx, pointing to a concentration of the fraud in some of the areas where need is already highest and where many residents depend on the program to put food on the table.
In response, Brooklyn's borough president called for urgent action on two fronts. The first was the creation of a dedicated office of SNAP fraud within the city's HRA and DSS agencies, an office that would be tasked with investigating fraud patterns, coordinating enforcement efforts and centralizing the reporting and collection of data on the crime across agencies.
The second demand was a technological fix. The borough president urged state agencies to speed up and prioritize the transition away from the magnetic stripe EBT cards still in use and toward the more secure chip-enabled cards that have become standard elsewhere, a change that officials argue would make it far harder for skimmers to copy and exploit recipients' benefits.