On the morning of Feb. 1, Amelia Feliciano went grocery shopping at BJ’s. She remembers because she took her 2-year-old and 4-year-old with her, which is a whole thing — “like surviving in the desert with no water” — and because it was the day her SNAP benefits, or food stamps, arrived. 

That morning when she got up, she called to be sure her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits were there (they were), got the kids ready to go, and drove to the store, about 15 minutes away from her home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Once they got there, she double-checked the balance on her electronic benefit transfer card — all good, she had about $1,000 — and started shopping. 

But when she got to the register to check out, her card was declined. 

“I told the young lady, ‘Can you please try again, because maybe I put the wrong PIN?’” Feliciano said. “She said, ‘No, love, there's nothing.’ I said, ‘Can you please?’ She went ahead and tried again. When she tried again, there was nothing. She gave me the receipt. There was not even one penny left.”

She didn’t know what to do, standing there with her cart full of groceries, her kids already eating chips and cookies.

“I'm explaining to the lady, ‘I swear the money was here.’ I'm crying in front of a whole bunch of strangers,” she said. “I called my mom. She Cash App-ed me the last $23 she had so I could pay for what my kids were eating. I apologized to everyone that was around me, went back to the car, and I just cried. I felt like I lost someone at that moment.”

Feliciano called the Connecticut Department of Social Services to report the theft. After waiting on hold for over two hours, she was told there was nothing they could do. 

In the last few years, it has become increasingly common for thieves to go after SNAP benefits. About 42 million people in the U.S. are on SNAP, and by 2022, so many were having their benefits stolen that Congress and then-President Joe Biden approved funding to reimburse them, at least in part.

But that money ran out at the end of December; Congress chose not to renew it. Which means Feliciano and anyone else whose benefits are stolen have no way of getting them replaced. And SNAP benefits are easy to steal. 

“EBT cards only have the black magnetic stripe on the back of them, and they don't have the chip that you find on your credit card and your debit card,” said Justin King, policy director at Propel, a software company that has an app that lets people manage government benefits.

There’s a reason most credit and debit cards have chips now: They’re much more secure. Chips encrypt the data on cards and generate a unique code every time the card is used; magnetic stripes do not. 

“Most likely what's happening is that the thieves are able to surreptitiously install what's called a skimming device on a point-of-sale terminal, or an ATM, that copies the information off of a magnetic stripe when someone uses it,” said Jamie Topolski, senior director of government payment products at Conduent.

They’re then able to use that account information and personal identification number to make a fake copy of the card. And with SNAP benefits, “they know the schedule from experience of when funds get loaded,” he said. “And so as soon as those funds hit, they will go shopping to deplete those funds as quickly as possible,” often for things like baby formula or energy drinks that they can easily resell for cash. 

That’s likely how Amelia Feliciano had her benefits stolen so soon after they were deposited on her card. 

Credit and debit cards used to be more vulnerable to this kind of theft, before they were embedded with chips. 

“Chip technology exists because if the banks have to reimburse us for stolen money, they want to stop the stealing,” said Edward Josephson, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society in New York. “But if the federal government doesn't have to reimburse people, then to some extent, they just don't care because it's only the poor people who are losing.”

Unlike banks, the federal government does not currently reimburse people whose SNAP benefits have been stolen. Andrew Kazakes, a managing attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, believes it should. 

“If we're going to do it for people who have debit cards and credit cards, we should be doing it for people who receive public benefits,” he said. “They're in a more financially vulnerable position.” 

States are free to enact their own protections for SNAP recipients who are the victims of theft, Kazakas noted, and a few have; California reimburses stolen SNAP benefits, at least in part. It is also leading the way in making EBT cards more secure. At the beginning of the year, the state became the first to start rolling out chip-enabled cards for SNAP recipients. Maryland and Oklahoma are also moving in that direction. 

But there’s no federal requirement EBT cards be made more secure. And Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, said it’s expensive to replace every SNAP recipient’s card with one that has a chip. 

Given that many states are operating on tight budgets, or with budget deficits, he said, “for this very expensive transition to happen, and to happen timely and quickly so that our SNAP participants are protected, Congress will need to help with funding.”

California budgeted $50 million for the transition to chip EBT cards. In New York, Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas, who represents the 34th district in Queens, said it would likely cost about $40 million. 

“Obviously funding is an issue,” she said. “They need the funds to make the transfers, to update the software and to mail the cards to every SNAP recipient.”

But it would also save the state money in the long run.

“If you switch to the chip-enabled card, which has a higher rate of security, you could prevent 87% of the skimming of benefits,” González-Rojas said.

There are other things states could be doing to reduce benefit theft in addition to switching to chip-enabled cards. 

“We could be blocking transactions at known fraudulent outlets,” said Justin King at Propel. “We could be messaging people to say, ‘Do you recognize this transaction? Do you approve it?’”

Or letting people lock their cards when they’re not using them, and unlock them only when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Amelia Feliciano in Connecticut would love that option. All she can do to try to prevent her benefits from being stolen again is constantly change the PIN on her card. 

“When I tell you I changed my PIN so many times, it came back to the next time for me to go grocery shopping, I forgot my PIN,” she said. “I’m traumatized. I’m scared. I’m scared that next month, what if they take it?”