LYNNWOOD, Wash. — A disturbing trend is emerging across Washington: people are having their SNAP benefits stolen right out from under them.
According to the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), scammers attach card skimmers to point-of-sale machines and steal card numbers and other information from credit, debit, and EBT cards.
The agency says the skimmers are hard to spot, and can be installed in less than a minute.
Kelly Cray lives in Lynnwood and says she was a victim of one of these scams back in October.
Cray says she was shocked to see the balance on her EBT card from go $300 to nothing.
“I went to make a purchase on the 13th, and saw that it was gone,” she recalled. “I saw my balance and thought, “What the heck?”
Cray says she was thankful to rely on friends and family to get her through, and had to go to food banks to get by.
But she’s currently unable to work due to medical issues and multiple surgeries, and with rising costs from inflation, she needs her SNAP benefits to survive.
“I count on that every month, and it was quite a shock to me when one day, I knew I had $300, and two days later, I had nothing,” she said.
Cray says she filed a police report and reached out to DSHS for help, but federal and state rules prohibit the replacement of stolen SNAP benefits.
“I was just flat out told I’m not going to be reimbursed. Maybe down the road, I don’t know. But it’s not like where there’s fraud at a bank, there’s insurance, and I couldn’t believe that from the government,” Cray said.
SNAP put out an advisory telling people that if they see a card skimmer or detect tampering, to stop using the machine immediately, and call the local authorities as soon as possible.