This may shock you . . . or not . . . but independent reporters led by Nick Shirley have confirmed that food-stamp fraud is rampant. At least it is in the streets of Seattle. Their work supplements a police investigation reported in October 2025.
One scheme involves fraudsters approaching “groups of unsheltered individuals . . . who had an EBT [electronic benefits transfer card] with money on it,” a Seattle police captain reported last year. They would “then take that person to a store with a shopping list.”
The fraudsters keep the goods for resale while paying the original card holder half the card value in cash. Alternatively, the fraudsters buy EBT cards at half-price directly from card holders.
Sometimes fraudsters let drug dealers know which persons living on the street have just gotten cash for their cards. The dealers then swarm into a homeless camps to sell their wares.
Shirley’s work shows that although police arrests of eleven of the scammers made a dent, the scams still go on — in Seattle and doubtless many other cities.
He found that local store clerks proved willing to adjust food prices charged to match the balance on an EBT card, say $120. Then, if all goes “well,” the clerk and the fraudster presumably split the take.
Shirley’s video doesn’t document the last part of the process because, to avoid being complicit in the scam, he kept entering a false PIN.
Welfare fraud is, apparently, easy to perpetrate, hard to patrol.
It used to be understood that the only way to distribute general benefits to the poor was to refuse to make it easy to receive, and to administer such programs as locally as possible. Incentives for bureaucrats and disincentives for abusers must always be made painfully clear. And punishments swift.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Fraud’s a SNAP”
I think that, so long as such programmes exist, primary focus should be on eligibility.
Criminalizing some uses of benefits is surely part of the solution, but the fundamental problem is that people are receiving benefits who, in exchange for those benefits, settle for far less in cash than the market value of the commodities that the benefits could purchase. In their eyes, $100 in benefits is worth less than $50 in cash, but that smaller sum is still more easily obtained by way of benefits than in some other way. Increasing apprehension rates or penalties would mean that the computation would be in terms of some smaller amount of cash, but so long as they would rather have that amount of cash than $100 in eligible items, they will make the exchange.
If a YouTuber with a $1000 budget is finding rampant millions in fraud, then the government politicians whose JOB it is to prevent fraud weren’t doing very good.
Suggests either corruption or incompetent negligence. Both of which are criminal. Which also suggests the same of the state DAs that are supposed to watchdog the politicians.