If a skimmer drains your food stamps today, you do not get the money back. Not from the state, not from Washington, not from anyone. The federal program that used to replace stolen SNAP benefits stopped taking claims at the end of September 2025, and it only ever covered thefts that happened before December 21, 2024, according to City Limits. The thieves are still working. The safety net behind the safety net is gone.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso held a rally on June 4 on the steps of Borough Hall, joined by twenty social service organizations from across the borough. “Food is being stolen directly from families and working New Yorkers, and Brooklyn is at the heart of this crisis,” Reynoso said, per Brooklyn Paper. He is demanding a new city Office of SNAP Fraud, a state-funded program to pay victims back, and a faster switch off the magnetic-stripe EBT cards that thieves crack wide open.
This is personal for Reynoso. “Growing up, my family relied on SNAP, it was often the difference between having food on the table or going to bed hungry,” he said at the press conference, per BKReader. “We cannot sit by idly while scammers prey on our neighbors and steal from the New Yorkers who need these benefits the most.”
SNAP is the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what your parents called food stamps, and it loads money onto an EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card. The scam is called skimming. A thief glues a hidden reader over the card slot at a bodega or an ATM, captures your card number and PIN, clones it, and empties the account the second your benefits hit, often before you have bought a carton of eggs. The magnetic stripe is the whole vulnerability, because it is trivial to copy. A chip is not.
Brooklyn is getting hit harder than almost anywhere. Since August 2023, Brooklyn and the Bronx together have accounted for roughly 60 percent of the SNAP theft reimbursement claims filed in New York City, per Brooklyn Paper, which traced the citywide skimming numbers to the New York State Comptroller: about 85,000 skimming cases statewide and nearly $40 million stolen across 2023 and 2024. That is close to 20 percent of the entire national total, according to Legal Services NYC, which sued the state over the cards in June 2025. Their count: nearly 3 million New Yorkers are still carrying skimmable magstripe EBT cards.
The losses are not slowing. New Yorkers lost $14.5 million to SNAP skimming statewide in the first six months of 2025, City Limits reported, and as of September, NYC residents alone had filed more than 34,000 skimming claims. Reynoso’s office pointed to the recent pace: over $7 million stolen in a single quarter, the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture data, per BKReader.
Theresa Price, 61, lives in NYCHA’s Woodside Houses and got skimmed three separate times in one year, losing $292 each time, City Limits reported. She had to borrow money to eat after every hit. When she called for help, she said, “They would tell you to go to the [food] pantry. It was hard. It was very hard.”
The lawsuit Legal Services NYC filed in June 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, on behalf of seven named victims and the advocacy group Red de Pueblos Trasnacionales, names the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance for failing to upgrade the cards. One plaintiff, Bronx resident Yiraldy Rodriguez, described it in the filing: “When my benefits were stolen, I felt completely helpless. I had no income at the time, and suddenly I had no way to feed my kids. I had to rely on my mom just to put food on the table. We were stretching meals, skipping meals, just trying to get by.”
New York did pass a fix. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the state’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget on May 28, 2026, and it directs the state to upgrade EBT cards to “secure chip-based technology that makes cards virtually impervious to skimming,” per the Governor’s Office, which called SNAP theft “an epidemic across the United States.” The problem is the calendar. The earliest chip-and-tap cards are not expected in New Yorkers’ hands until February 2027, and the rollout to nearly 3 million cardholders takes time after that. Until then, every card in every wallet in Bushwick is still the same skimmable stripe.
The law is on the books, the thieves are working today, and the people getting drained in the meantime have no card that protects them and no program that pays them back. The fix arrives a year and a half after the recourse disappeared.
With reimbursement gone, Reynoso’s other demands matter more. In a letter sent to the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance and the city Department of Social Services, he laid out five asks: a dedicated Office of SNAP Fraud inside the city’s social services apparatus, the accelerated chip transition, stronger fraud reporting and enforcement, a multilingual public-education campaign on skimming, and a state-funded reimbursement program to replace the dead federal one. Six community leaders spoke alongside him, including Kong Leung Chan, whose son was skimmed. “When benefits are stolen, there is no help, no support. Just more pain and less food,” Chan said, per Brooklyn Paper.
Until February 2027, the only real defense is doing the state’s job yourself. New York added a lock feature to the ConnectEBT app on February 21, 2024 that lets you freeze your card the moment you finish shopping, blocking all purchases and transactions until you unlock it, per the Governor’s Office. Lock it after every swipe, change your PIN often, and spend your benefits as soon as they load, before a cloned card can. If you live in Brooklyn and you have been hit, Reynoso’s office at Borough Hall is collecting these stories to push the state, and the community groups that stood with him on June 4, from Mixteca to the Council of Peoples Organization to the Arab American Association, are helping victims file and find food in the meantime.
Featured image: Office of the Brooklyn Borough President
