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With SNAP theft rising, parents struggle to feed their families

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Hines, 46, was going through a severe depression that left her unable to continue working full-time as a personal care attendant when she received her first round of SNAP benefits in January. With only 57 cents left on her card after she discovered the funds were gone, and a month to go until the next deposit, Hines went to food pantries for noodles, bread, cheese, and soup to feed herself and two sons. Advertisement 'I was so happy to have that money and for it to be gone in … a blink of an eye, I felt like somebody stabbed me in the heart,' she said. 'To me it felt like a million dollars — $600, I can feed my kids.' Advertisement Roughly 7,800 Massachusetts families have had more than $3.6 million stolen from their accounts since mid-December, according to the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, an advocacy group for low-income families. The rate of thefts is on the rise, currently draining about $1 million a month from residents' accounts, MLRI said; all told, roughly $18 million in SNAP funds have been stolen from state residents over the past three years. Criminals have been skimming data from electronic benefits transfer cards loaded with SNAP benefits since at least 2021, The funds can then be deposited into an account or transferred to a cloned card to make bulk purchases of items that can easily be resold. In fiscal years 2023 and 2024, more than $220 million in SNAP funds were stolen nationwide, 'It's our understanding that they are part of an organized crime ring,' said Birabwa Kajubi, associate commissioner for quality management at the state Department of Transitional Assistance, which administers SNAP benefits and works with the Skimming has become a major issue for consumers of all types. Last summer, Advertisement In November, the Springfield Police Department issued But credit and debit card holders have largely been shielded from fraud by federal protections, and most of those cards have been equipped with chips for a decade. These protections don't apply to EBT cards, however. Equipping EBT cards with chips, which generate a unique transaction code for each purchase and make it much more difficult to steal information, is the 'most promising systemic solution,' Kajubi said. In January, California became the first state to issue chip EBT cards, and Governor Maura Healey recently allocated In late November, DTA rolled out a tool that allows SNAP recipients to lock their accounts using an app or online portal. But as Hines's experience shows, funds can be drained quickly — sometimes minutes after they're deposited in recipients' accounts. Adding pressure to the situation is the fact that the SNAP program is facing cuts of up to Advocates are pushing the state, which previously dedicated around $3 million to supplement federal replacement funds, to allocate Advertisement 'While we see more and more devastating cuts coming from the Trump administration and Congress, it's clear we cannot rely on the federal government to support our residents as they previously did to replace stolen SNAP benefits,' said Kennedy, a Democrat. Until chip cards are in place, families whose benefits are stolen need help to feed their families, said Victoria Negus, senior economic justice advocate at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Parents have told about skipping meals to feed their children and counting out change to buy a gallon of milk. 'I learned my SNAP was stolen when trying to purchase a full cart of groceries at Market Basket,' one said. 'We are hungry. We have no food. We did not eat yesterday.' The government finger-pointing has been 'infuriating,' Negus said: 'State government pointing at federal government, federal government pointing at state, and nobody has systemically taken the steps that families need to put them on equal footing in the checkout line.' Hines, who has been careful to lock her card since her account was drained, is still worried about feeding her family, especially with the economy in turmoil and tariffs threatening to raise prices even higher. 'Things are very expensive now,' she said. 'You spend $100 and you're getting a bag of groceries and it's not feeding you for a week. … If things go any higher, I don't even know what we are going to do.' Advertisement This story was produced by the Globe's team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter . Katie Johnston can be reached at