This Is the Real SNAP Fraud
Scammers steal billions of dollars in food stamps from needy people every year. Why isn’t Congress doing anything to stop them?
https://newrepublic.com/article/204257/snap-targeted-benefit-fraud
https://archive.ph/Xz45h
When Republican politicians complain about “food stamp fraud,” they generally mean that some welfare cheat is ripping off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by falsely claiming eligibility. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for instance, is fixated on undocumented immigrants accessing the program illegally. “The Democrat Party,” she said in November, “built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census.” Never mind that undocumented immigrants can’t vote.
MAGA hacks like Rollins seldom acknowledge that a SNAP beneficiary is likelier to be the victim of a crime rather than its perpetrator. So-called targeted benefit fraud is common, costing an estimated $12 billion per year. And Rollins has to know that a thief who steals directly from a SNAP recipient is much likelier to be a hardened criminal than a SNAP recipient who bends or breaks some eligibility rule.
“This is white-collar crime,” Mark Haskin of the Agriculture Department’s special investigations unit told an Atlanta TV news reporter last year. “This is organized crime.” A Romanian transnational mafia gang known as the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group, for instance, allegedly led by one Mihai Dorneanu, stole over $180 million from California welfare funds, leading in February 2025 to 11 arrests by Romanian authorities, five by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and four by local police. Two members remained at large after they cut their ankle monitors and jumped bail in 2023. One of them was later arrested in Australia.
If some crook hacks your Visa or Mastercard and goes on a shopping spree, Visa or Mastercard will make you whole. Federal law limits to $50 a consumer’s liability for credit card fraud, and the more reputable credit card companies typically won’t hold you liable at all. But if you’re a SNAP recipient and some crook hacks your electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, card, you’re out of luck. No federal statute extends you the slightest protection, and, except California and Maryland, no state will reimburse you out of its own funds. You just go hungry.
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...a basic education, or to not allow people to die on the steps of the hospital because they couldn't pay will always be used against Democrats by Republicans.
Mind you, many of them belong to religious institutions that do a lot of these things as well while they enjoy huge tax breaks, but of course the price of entry is hearing "the word"--so somehow it is different. It is also far less efficient, doesn't meet people where they actually are, and lacks a lot of the power needed to solve complex problems--but hey, they can feel better about themselves AND use it as a political cudgel against us "libs."
Never mind that the guy hanging on the cross there was a "lib."
But yeah, we only do it to get the census numbers up so we can have more seats in Congress....
