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Vance Hunts Food Stamp Lamborghinis While Thieves Steal $470 Million
Description
JD Vance keeps warning America about people driving Lamborghinis on food stamps, and ProPublica just found the real SNAP fraud. Crime rings stole $470 million from more than 990,000 families last year, and the Trump administration cut the money to stop them.
Back in May, at a rally in Des Moines, Vance said, “if you are wealthy enough to afford a Lamborghini, then you are wealthy enough to not receive SNAP benefits.” Finally, somebody brave enough to take on the Lamborghini lobby. He also said hunting fraud in government is “like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.”
So how much fraud do SNAP recipients actually commit? USDA’s own reports put it at $64 million a year. That’s 0.08% of benefits. The Lamborghini guy is a rounding error on a rounding error, and honestly, he might not even exist.
The real money is going somewhere else. EBT cards still run on 1960s magnetic stripe technology, the stuff your bank card moved past more than a decade ago. Thieves slap skimmers on ATMs, gas pumps and corner store card readers, copy the card and the PIN, and drain it. One Romanian crew bought 3,960 cans of Red Bull at one San Diego grocery store in a single day with 25 cloned cards. Somebody on that crew can now see sounds.
The fix is a little chip in the card. Hill staffers put the price at around $215 million. Theft from these benefit cards costs more than $600 million a year. Even the Republican chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Glenn Thompson, called chip technology “very effective.” Then he shut the proposal down, citing budget constraints. Because $215 million is a lot of money when you’re only losing $600 million a year.
And victims used to get their stolen benefits paid back. More than 750,000 households did. Then in December 2024, Elon Musk went after the spending deal that would have kept those payments going, more than 100 times on X, and Trump sank it. Now victims get nothing back. An Alabama man lost $893 and said, “I ate rice and grits the rest of the month.” A victim in Virginia said, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.” Are you fecking kidding me? You get robbed by a card skimmer and the government hits you with a restocking fee.
Meanwhile, the administration dropped EBT theft money from its budget requests and cut at least 650 staff from the agency that runs SNAP. And the federal government stopped tracking this theft altogether, which is one way to get the fraud numbers down.
USDA’s response to ProPublica? Finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” Pointing at $470 million in stolen groceries is called subtraction.
If you or anyone you love uses an EBT card, that’s your grocery money sitting on a gas pump waiting to get copied, while the people in charge are out looking for sports cars. ProPublica did the digging on this one, so go read it, link’s in the description.
Vance has the barrel and the dynamite, and he’s still out in the parking lot looking for a Lamborghini.
Sources:
https://www.propublica.org/article/food-stamp-snap-benefits-theft-skimmers-fraud
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