Dawn Hines had just finished a quick grocery run when she realized all the SNAP funds had been drained from her card — $608 gone in the 10 minutes it took to get through the checkout line at the Braintree Stop & Shop, walk back to her car, and check her account.
Hines’s family is one of thousands of low-income Massachusetts families that collectively have had millions of dollars in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds stolen in recent months. The theft of SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, has become a national epidemic in recent years, fueled by suspected crime rings using skimmers on retail card readers to access electronic benefits cards.
Since December, when federal funding to replace stolen SNAP money was halted, families have been left without the help they rely on to put food on the table. And massive funding cuts to the SNAP program being discussed by the Trump administration make additional federal replacement funds unlikely.
Hines, 46, was going through a severe depression that left her unable to continue working full time as a personal care attendant when she received her first round of SNAP benefits in January. With only 57 cents left on her card after she discovered the funds were gone, and a month to go until the next deposit, Hines went to food pantries for noodles, bread, cheese, and soup to feed herself and two sons.
“I was so happy to have that money and for it to be gone in . . . a blink of an eye, I felt like somebody stabbed me in the heart,’’ she said. “To me it felt like a million dollars — $600, I can feed my kids.’’
Roughly 7,800 Massachusetts families have had more than $3.6 million stolen from their accounts since mid-December, according to the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, an advocacy group for low-income families. The rate of thefts is on the rise, currently draining about $1 million a month from residents’ accounts, MLRI said; all told, roughly $18 million in SNAP funds has been stolen from state residents over the past three years.
Criminals have been skimming data from electronic benefits transfer cards loaded with SNAP benefits since at least 2021, according to the FBI, by inserting or overlaying undetectable devices on card readers in stores, some of which can wirelessly transmit information from the cards’ magnetic stripes. The funds can then be deposited into an account or transferred to a cloned card to make bulk purchases of items that can easily be resold.
In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, more than $220 million in SNAP funds was stolen nationwide, according to the USDA.
“It’s our understanding that they are part of an organized crime ring,’’ said Birabwa Kajubi, associate commissioner for quality management at the state Department of Transitional Assistance, which administers SNAP benefits and works with the USDA and local police departments to investigate thefts.
Skimming has become a major issue for consumers of all types. Last summer, six British, Romanian, and Irish citizens were charged with defrauding thousands of Rhode Island and Massachusetts residents using skimming devices at ATMs and retail stores, and two Romanian nationals recently admitted to installing card skimmers at ATMs in six states, including Rhode Island and Massachusetts, over two years.
In November, the Springfield Police Department issued an alert about skimming, noting that four skimmers had been found in convenience stores.
But credit and debit card holders have largely been shielded from fraud by federal protections, and most of those cards have been equipped with chips for a decade. These protections don’t apply to EBT cards, however. Equipping EBT cards with chips, which generate a unique transaction code for each purchase and make it much more difficult to steal information, is the “most promising systemic solution,’’ Kajubi said.
In January, California became the first state to issue chip EBT cards, and Governor Maura Healey recently allocated $15.5 million in her supplemental budget for the current fiscal year to convert SNAP benefits to chip cards. But it will take months to update point-of-sale devices in retail stores and issue new cards. In the meantime, the swipe cards used by more than 665,000 older adults, people with disabilities, and working parents in Massachusetts remain vulnerable to skimming.
In late November, DTA rolled out a tool that allows SNAP recipients to lock their accounts using an app or online portal. But as Hines’s experience shows, funds can be drained quickly — sometimes minutes after they’re deposited in recipients’ accounts.
Adding pressure to the situation is the fact that the SNAP program is facing cuts of up to $230 billion from the Trump administration, which would slash the program by more than 20 percent.
Advocates are pushing the state, which previously dedicated around $3 million to supplement federal replacement funds, to allocate $6 million to help families grappling with stolen benefits. State Senator Robyn Kennedy of Worcester, who sponsored a bill to grant replacement funds, said in a statement that this is a “modest investment compared to the daily harm being inflicted on low-income households, many of whom rely on these benefits to feed their children.’’
“While we see more and more devastating cuts coming from the Trump administration and Congress, it’s clear we cannot rely on the federal government to support our residents as they previously did to replace stolen SNAP benefits,’’ said Kennedy, a Democrat.
Until chip cards are in place, families whose benefits are stolen need help, said Victoria Negus, senior economic justice advocate at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Parents have told about skipping meals to feed their children and counting out change to buy a gallon of milk.
“I learned my SNAP was stolen when trying to purchase a full cart of groceries at Market Basket,’’ one said. “We are hungry. We have no food. We did not eat yesterday.’’
The government finger-pointing has been “infuriating,’’ Negus said: “State government pointing at federal government, federal government pointing at state, and nobody has systemically taken the steps that families need to put them on equal footing in the checkout line.’’
Hines, who has been careful to lock her card since her account was drained, is still worried about feeding her family, especially with the economy in turmoil and tariffs threatening to raise prices even higher.
“Things are very expensive now,’’ she said. “You spend $100 and you’re getting a bag of groceries and it’s not feeding you for a week. . . . If things go any higher, I don’t even know what we are going to do.’’
This story was produced by the Globe’s
Money, Power, Inequality
team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.