SNAP Fraud Statistics in US 2026 | Key Facts

SNAP Fraud in the US 2026

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the largest domestic food assistance program in the United States — is bleeding money at a pace that has alarmed federal investigators, members of Congress, and state officials across the political spectrum. As of February 2026, the program serves approximately 41.7 million Americans every single month and distributes close to $100 billion in annual benefits through Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Yet the system protecting those benefits still relies overwhelmingly on the same magnetic-stripe card technology that banks and credit card companies retired over a decade ago — a gap that transnational criminal organizations have ruthlessly exploited. In late January 2026, the U.S. Secret Service launched multi-city “Operation Frostbite” sweeps across Cleveland, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Denver, inspecting thousands of point-of-sale terminals and removing dozens of illegal skimming devices in a single week — a vivid, real-time snapshot of just how active and widespread SNAP EBT fraud in the US in 2026 truly is.

What makes this moment uniquely alarming is the convergence of several crises happening simultaneously. USDA’s own chief SNAP fraud investigator, Mark Haskins, told investigators on record that while official dashboards show $250 million in benefits stolen in 2024, the real figure could be $12 billion a year or more — roughly 48 times what is officially reported. The federal program that reimbursed theft victims expired in December 2024, leaving hundreds of thousands of families with no recourse. The Trump administration’s audit of 29 states’ SNAP data in late 2025 uncovered 186,000 deceased individuals still receiving benefits and 500,000 people receiving benefits simultaneously in more than one state. In February 2026, a Massachusetts federal case charged four individuals with using 100+ stolen identities to steal $440,000 in SNAP benefits across two states. The picture that emerges from the freshest confirmed data is of a $100 billion program facing a multi-front fraud crisis that existing technology, policy, and enforcement resources are not yet equipped to fully contain.

Key SNAP Fraud Facts in the US 2026 — At a Glance

The table below brings together the most important verified and news-confirmed facts about SNAP fraud in the US as of February 19, 2026, drawn from USDA FNS, U.S. Secret Service, DOJ, GAO, and major news outlets.

Sources: USDA FNS SNAP fraud dashboard (fns.usda.gov/snap/fraud); Fox News / USDA data release, November 19, 2025; Atlanta News First Investigates, January 9, 2026; U.S. Secret Service press release “Operation Frostbite,” February 2026 (secretservice.gov); DOJ / USDA OIG press release, February 5, 2026 (oig.ssa.gov); NPR, December 1, 2025; Fox Business, November 17, 2025; LexisNexis Risk Solutions True Cost of Fraud Study for SNAP, June 2025

Reading these numbers together reveals how dramatically the SNAP fraud problem in the US has intensified entering 2026. The single most striking data point is the gap between what is officially tracked — $250 million on USDA’s own fraud dashboard for all of 2024 — and what the agency’s lead investigator says the real figure likely is: $12 billion or more per year. That 48-fold gap is not a rounding error; it reflects a fundamental limitation in how EBT theft is reported, since most skimming incidents go undetected or unreported by victims who do not realize their card was compromised until benefits are already gone. Equally alarming is that the fraud is clearly accelerating: from $31.9 million stolen in Q1 FY 2024 to $102 million+ in Q1 FY 2025, a 220% year-over-year increase in just the officially reported figures — while the true underlying growth is almost certainly larger still. The February 2026 Massachusetts federal case, the January 2026 Secret Service sweeps, and the January 2026 Atlanta News First investigation all confirm this is not a static problem — it is a crisis growing in real time.

SNAP EBT Skimming & Card Theft Statistics in the US 2026

EBT card skimming and cloning is the fastest-growing and most financially damaging form of SNAP fraud in the US right now. Every number in this table comes from verified federal or major news-media sources published within the last 90 days.

Sources: USDA FNS (fns.usda.gov); U.S. Secret Service “Operation Frostbite” press release, February 2026 (secretservice.gov); Atlanta News First Investigates, January 9, 2026 (atlantanewsfirst.com); DOJ press release, February 6, 2025 (justice.gov); CalMatters, January 2026 (calmatters.org); DOJ/USDA OIG, February 5, 2026 (oig.ssa.gov)

The U.S. Secret Service’s January 2026 “Operation Frostbite” multi-city sweep is the clearest proof available right now of how embedded skimming infrastructure has become across American retail. In Denver alone, agents visited 362 businesses, inspected more than 2,700 point-of-sale terminals, gas pumps, and ATMs, and removed 19 illegal skimming devices — estimating that those devices, if left in place, would have enabled more than $19.79 million in potential losses. Seattle yielded 14 more devices and a prevented loss estimate of $14.5 million. These were just four cities in a single week — a tiny fraction of the national retail landscape — which means the total installed base of active skimming equipment across the country is almost certainly in the hundreds or thousands of devices at any given moment. USDA investigator Mark Haskins told Atlanta News First in January 2026 that criminals have moved well beyond physical skimmers to hacking store register point-of-sale systems directly and wiring stolen funds to overseas accounts, a method that leaves no physical device to find and is functionally invisible to the standard law enforcement response.

SNAP Eligibility Fraud & Ghost Recipients in the US 2026

Beyond card skimming, the Trump administration’s data audit of 29 states in 2025 and 2026 revealed a separate layer of SNAP program integrity failures — benefits flowing to people who should not be receiving them at all.

Sources: Fox Business, November 17, 2025 (foxbusiness.com); CBS Boston, February 4, 2026 (cbsnews.com); NPR, December 1, 2025 (npr.org); PBS NewsHour, December 2, 2025 (pbs.org); LexisNexis Risk Solutions True Cost of Fraud Study for SNAP, June 2025 (risk.lexisnexis.com); U.S. Attorney District of Massachusetts press release, February 4, 2026

The revelation that 186,000 deceased individuals were still drawing SNAP benefits — discovered from just 29 of 50 states’ data — sent shockwaves through Washington and across national media in November 2025. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made the figure the centerpiece of her public case for overhauling the program, citing data showing 186,000 dead people receiving benefits and 500,000 collecting twice as grounds to require all 42 million recipients to reapply. Critics, including congressional Democrats and program integrity experts, noted that some of these cases likely represent administrative errors rather than intentional fraud — a distinction the Congressional Research Service has formally noted. That important nuance does not, however, diminish the scale of the problem: whether caused by fraud or error, hundreds of thousands of SNAP payments are flowing to ineligible households each month. The February 4, 2026 Massachusetts case, in which a restaurant owner and associates used 100+ stolen identities to claim $440,000 in SNAP benefits across two states — wiring proceeds to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic — illustrates exactly how eligibility fraud and transnational crime intersect within a program that the U.S. Attorney on the case publicly described as suffering from “rampant fraud across this nation.”

SNAP Improper Payment Error Rate in the US 2026

The federal SNAP payment error rate is the official government benchmark for measuring benefits accuracy. It captures overpayments and underpayments but is distinct from fraud — it includes both intentional and unintentional errors.

Sources: USDA FNS SNAP Quality Control Payment Error Rates, June 2025 (fns.usda.gov); Mercatus Center, “Reducing Waste and Fraud in SNAP,” May 2025 (mercatus.org); GAO Report GAO-24-107461, September 2024 (gao.gov); Congressional Research Service IF10860

The Mercatus Center’s May 2025 research paper put the trajectory in the starkest possible terms: SNAP’s overpayment rate climbed from just over 2% in 2012 to over 10% in 2023 — a more-than-350% rise — costing taxpayers approximately $10 billion annually, and that figure does not even include EBT card skimming losses. The slight improvement from 11.7% in FY 2023 to 10.93% in FY 2024 is acknowledged by USDA but considered far from sufficient. The Mercatus analysis noted that despite a 350% increase in program integrity spending over the past decade, waste and fraud remained pervasive, suggesting that simply spending more money on the same oversight approaches is not working. The FY 2025 error tolerance threshold of $57 per month means that any state whose sample-month overpayment or underpayment exceeds that amount per case is counted as an error — a relatively low bar that the majority of states are currently failing, with most now required to submit corrective action plans to USDA simultaneously.

SNAP Retailer Trafficking Statistics in the US 2026

Retailer trafficking — store owners exchanging SNAP benefits for cash — is a separately tracked, long-established form of program fraud that continues despite decades of enforcement.

Sources: USDA FNS “SNAP Fraud Prevention” (fns.usda.gov/snap/fraud); Congressional Research Service IF10860 (congress.gov); GAO-24-107461, September 2024; CBS Boston, February 4, 2026 (cbsnews.com); DOJ/USDA OIG press release, February 5, 2026

Retailer trafficking has been declining over the long term — from roughly 4% in the early 2000s to about 1% in FY 2015–2017 — thanks to FNS’s ALERT transaction monitoring system and the permanent disqualification of more than 8,000 stores over the past decade. But the February 2026 Massachusetts case illustrates how trafficking has evolved: the restaurant owner and associates did not just exchange cards for cash in the classic sense — they used fraudulently obtained SNAP cards to purchase bulk food for the El Primo restaurant, turning the program’s food-purchase authorization into a tax-free food cost subsidy for a commercial business, then wired profits to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. This kind of sophisticated, multi-layered trafficking is harder to detect and prosecute than simple cash exchanges, and it underscores why the GAO’s long-standing unimplemented 2018 recommendation for USDA to conduct a new national trafficking study is so consequential — the official 1% rate is based on data nearly a decade old and almost certainly does not reflect current criminal methods.

SNAP Fraud by State in the US 2026

Geographic distribution of SNAP fraud in the US varies significantly by state, driven by population size, EBT processor security, state enforcement capacity, and criminal targeting patterns.

Sources: Fox News / USDA FNS data, November 19, 2025 (foxnews.com); CalMatters, January 2026 (calmatters.org); CBS Boston, February 4, 2026 (cbsnews.com); Boston Herald, February 15, 2026 (bostonherald.com); Atlanta News First Investigates, January 9, 2026 (atlantanewsfirst.com)

Alabama leading the nation in Q1 FY 2025 stolen SNAP claims with more than 26,000 fraudulent claims — ahead of vastly larger states like California and New York — points to a key truth about how criminal organizations choose targets: they go where security is weakest, not necessarily where the most money flows. Georgia is the most dramatic example of escalation in this reporting period, with what investigators linked to a cyberattack on an EBT call-center vendor in 2024 causing the state’s official theft figures to explode from $4.4 million for all of FY 2024 to more than $23 million in Q1 FY 2025 alone. Massachusetts has become a major focus in early 2026, with a February 15, 2026 Boston Herald whistleblower report describing SNAP fraud tied to the state’s right-to-shelter law as “rampant” and a February 4 federal case in which the U.S. Attorney described benefit fraud as openly discussed among criminal networks as a reliable, low-risk income stream. California, despite being the only state with chip EBT cards in circulation, still loses more than $4 million per month to theft — evidence that chip cards are necessary but not sufficient on their own to stop the full range of fraud methods now being used.

SNAP Fraud Enforcement Actions in the US 2026

The federal response to SNAP fraud in the US has intensified sharply in early 2026, with the Trump administration, U.S. Secret Service, DOJ, and USDA OIG all escalating enforcement operations.

Sources: U.S. Secret Service “Operation Frostbite” press release, February 2026 (secretservice.gov); DOJ press release, February 6, 2025 (justice.gov); DOJ / USDA OIG press release, February 5, 2026 (oig.ssa.gov); Fox Business, November 17, 2025; NPR, December 1, 2025; PBS NewsHour, December 2, 2025; USDA FNS (fns.usda.gov/snap/fraud)

The Secret Service’s January 2026 Operation Frostbite is the most concrete, confirmed enforcement milestone of the year so far, and its findings reinforce why federal investigators are so alarmed. Across just four cities in less than two weeks, agents found and removed 33 illegal skimming devices and estimated they prevented more than $34 million in combined potential losses — meaning the devices were already installed and operational, silently harvesting card data before the sweep. Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn stated publicly that the operation demonstrates why a “proactive approach to cyber-enabled financial fraud” is necessary — language that implicitly acknowledges that the reactive, complaint-driven model has failed to keep pace with the scale of criminality. On the legal front, the Massachusetts February 4, 2026 case caught particular attention because U.S. Attorney Leah Foley explicitly said her office was adding a dedicated fraud coordinator specifically because SNAP fraud in Massachusetts has reached a level that demanded a permanent specialized response — not a one-off task force but a structural change to how federal prosecutors will treat this category of crime going forward.

True Cost of SNAP Fraud to US Taxpayers in 2026

The financial damage from SNAP fraud in the US extends well beyond the direct dollar value of stolen or misspent benefits.

Sources: LexisNexis Risk Solutions True Cost of Fraud Study for SNAP, June 2025 (risk.lexisnexis.com); Mercatus Center, May 2025 (mercatus.org); GAO-24-107461, September 2024 (gao.gov); USDA FNS newsroom; Atlanta News First / USDA FNS, January 2026

The LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study for SNAP, published in June 2025, introduced a multiplier that reframes the entire conversation: every $1 of SNAP benefits lost to fraud actually costs agencies $3.72 in total when internal labor for detection, investigation, reporting, data exchanges, and administrative tasks are factored in. Applied to even the conservative official stolen-benefits figure of $250 million for FY 2024, that formula implies a total fraud burden of nearly $1 billion for that category alone — and applied to the $12 billion real-loss estimate, the total economic drag exceeds $44 billion. This matters because it reframes the cost-benefit analysis of prevention investment: spending tens of millions on chip card rollouts, Secret Service sweeps, and fraud detection software becomes obviously worthwhile when measured against a $3.72 return on every $1 protected. The Mercatus Center’s parallel finding is equally sobering: despite a 350% increase in program integrity spending over the past decade, the fraud and error problem has not only persisted but worsened — suggesting that the money is being spent on approaches that are not working, and that structural solutions like mandatory chip-card technology and real-time cross-state eligibility verification are the interventions that are actually needed.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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