One morning last week, Mariel Mejía ducked downstairs from her apartment to a corner bodega in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood to grab eggs and milk for her son’s breakfast. But when she swiped her food stamp card, the cashier grimaced. There was no money on it.
She was stunned. “I told him it was impossible,” she said in Spanish. The $380 she receives monthly in benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps, had been deposited just the day before.
She had been “skimmed” — victimized by a widespread fraud in which scammers copy data from SNAP cards. They stole at least $52 million statewide in the period between 2023 and 2025 when the government was tracking the con. And she had no recourse: The federal government, which provides SNAP to the poorest Americans, no longer reimburses stolen money.
“I live counting every dollar,” said Ms. Mejía, 45, a day care employee. She called a SNAP call center run by the Food Bank For NYC for help. “It hurts to see my children and to explain to them that there isn’t enough today,” she said.
But New York is making moves to fight the fraud. This month, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said that the state would upgrade from magnetic strips to more secure, encrypted chip-and-pin technology on the cards, known as Electronic Benefits Transfer or E.B.T. cards.
While a few other states have begun similar initiatives, only California has fully implemented the tech despite its wide use in banking and an epidemic of skimming fraud that siphoned more than $320 million in SNAP nationwide in 2023 and 2024. Officials warn the real amount is higher, as some theft goes unnoticed, and some people do not report it.
The governor’s announcement comes as the federal government takes aim at the social safety net, including by basing cuts to funds states receive for food stamps on rates of fraud by SNAP beneficiaries. In fact, advocates say, food stamp users are more likely to be victims of fraud.
“As federally funded nutrition programs like SNAP are under attack in Washington, Governor Hochul has been laser-focused on ensuring New Yorkers can access resources,” Nicolette Simmonds, a spokeswoman for the governor, wrote in an email.
The governor’s office did not provide a timeline, nor estimate on the cost of the upgrade to the cards. About three million New Yorkers receive food stamps each month, according to the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees the program statewide.
The scam typically happens when a skimming device is secretly placed on a payment terminal that copies the information on a user’s card. It took off in about 2022, and the government began tracking it a year later. Victims no longer can get their money back; a federal reimbursement program expired in December 2024, and the Trump administration did not renew it.
The scam also can take money from cash assistance, the program that provides no-strings-attached cash benefits to some people. Cash assistance is funded by a mix of state and federal funding, and scam victims are still reimbursed with state money.
In an emailed statement, Alec Varsamis, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, which oversees SNAP, applauded New York’s announced changes as “important steps toward preventing fraud and ensuring benefits reach those who truly need them.” But he also criticized New York and the many Democrat-led states that have refused a Trump administration request to share SNAP recipient data, saying they were perpetuating other types of benefit fraud.
“They choose to protect illegals, criminals and bad actors over the American taxpayer,” Mr. Varsamis said.
Just six other states have began moving toward chip-and-pin, or smart card, programs, according to the Agriculture Department. In California, early studies show a more than 83 percent drop in fraud since the changeover. The slow adoption is in part because states must bear the cost of the upgrade, but don’t have to reimburse stolen money, according to Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst on the food assistance team at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“The cost is falling on the victims, not the states or the federal government,” Ms. Bergh said in an interview. “That has kind of undermined the incentive for the people who have the power to address this problem to actually fix it.”
Chris Edwards, of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said subverting the scam should be a bipartisan issue. “Usually fraud is against the taxpayer; with the skimming, it’s against the program recipients,” said Mr. Edwards, who has written about SNAP fraud. “Everyone can see this is wrong.”
He added: “If smart cards seem to be the answer, we should see both Republican and Democratic states doing this.”
Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Social Services, which administers the program in New York City, said that the upgrades are essential. But she stressed that while poor New Yorkers wait for safer cards, they are still being robbed with no compensation. Of the 113,000 SNAP claims statewide during the 2023-25 period that were approved for compensation, 85 percent were from New York City.
“We still need long overdue action at the federal level to reinstate reimbursements until E.B.T. cards are enabled with chip technology,” she said in an email.
Indeed, calls from skimming victims still pour in almost daily to the Jewish Association Serving the Aging, said Meredith Levine, a senior director of the nonprofit, which has struggled with how to help. Older people, like JASA’s clients, are some of the most vulnerable to skimming, she said. They may find it challenging to follow recommended defensive measures like going online to block cards from being used in between purchases.
“They are preying on the most vulnerable population and on the most dire need,” said Ms. Levine.
In November, Yafa Edery Benhamou, 69, found herself among those preyed upon. Standing at a grocery store checkout in her neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, she found her SNAP balance had been wiped out. A phone call to the program revealed a duplicate card used at a store far away in Brooklyn had made off with her monthly $158 and a balance she had been saving. And, since the government no longer makes people whole, there was nothing to be done.
“This is the money that I use for food,” said Ms. Benhamou, a retired teacher who is recovering from a double lung transplant. “I felt, what kind of people can do that?”
She turned to JASA, which gave her a gift card to get her through the month. Still, Ms. Benhamou said she supported the federal government’s push to root out all types of fraud. “But at the end of the day we are the victims, the ones that need this money,” she said. “We suffer from it.”
Shayla Colon contributed reporting.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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