How common is EBT card misuse in the United States in 2023?
Executive summary
EBT card misuse in 2023 was significant enough to trigger heightened federal and state scrutiny, with USDA estimating an unusually high overall SNAP improper payment rate of 11.7 percent (about $10.5 billion) for fiscal year 2023, a figure that blends errors and fraud rather than isolating criminal theft alone [1]. State-level reports and media investigations documented tens to hundreds of thousands of individual EBT theft incidents around that period, prompting pilot security fixes and legislative proposals [2] [3].
1. What the official numbers say: a spike in improper payments, not a clean fraud tally
The clearest national metric for 2023 is the USDA’s estimate that roughly 11.7 percent of SNAP outlays were “improper” in fiscal year 2023 — about $10.5 billion of roughly $90.1 billion — but the GAO cautions that “improper” includes administrative errors, eligibility mistakes, and fraud combined, so it does not equate directly to criminal EBT card theft alone [1]. Congressional analysts and watchdogs have flagged that pandemic-era policy changes, staffing shortfalls, and the return to pre-pandemic rules probably pushed error rates up after FY2021, complicating year-to-year comparisons [4].
2. On-the-ground theft: hundreds of thousands of incidents reported in adjacent quarters
State-by-state reporting collected by USDA and reported in outlets showed large numbers of theft reports concentrated in some states — for example, New York reported 16,372 fraud cases in the final quarter of 2023 and later far higher quarterly totals — and nationwide reporting in early 2024 documented roughly 177,000 instances in one quarter, illustrating the scale of reported incidents around late‑2023 and early‑2024 [2]. Other compilations of USDA data across mid‑2023 to 2024 reflect hundreds of thousands of victimized households, suggesting that individual theft incidents during and immediately after 2023 were not isolated [5] [6].
3. How criminals do it — and why numbers can jump suddenly
Reporting and law‑enforcement briefings describe skimming, cloning, phishing and mass balance‑checking attacks as primary vectors: data is skimmed from cards or point‑of‑sale devices, PINs are harvested or brute‑forced, and criminals rapidly drain accounts — methods that can produce sudden surges in reported thefts once detected [6] [7] [8]. These technical vectors explain why theft incidents can spike even when longstanding program fraud rates are relatively low historically — organized schemes exploit specific infrastructure weaknesses rather than routine program misuse [9] [10].
4. Context and disagreement: “big problem” versus “small share” narratives
Advocates and watchdogs emphasize that rising EBT theft is an acute, targeted harm that strips vulnerable households of needed benefits and merits systemic fixes such as chip cards and out‑of‑state transaction blocks [5] [3]. By contrast, some analyses and think tanks stress that fraud historically represents a small share of total SNAP outlays and caution against overstating theft as a percentage of the program’s budget, noting long-term declines in certain types of consumer fraud [10] [11]. Both narratives are supported by facts in the record: criminal EBT thefts surged in reported incidents around late‑2023, while broader historical trends show fraud as a minority component of total program dollars — the difference lies in definitions and which metrics are foregrounded [1] [10].
5. Policy response and limits of available data
Since the 2023 period, states and Congress have pursued pilots and proposals — from chip‑enabled EBT cards to app‑locking features and reimbursement policies — but federal funding for a wholesale chip rollout was limited and uneven, leaving patchwork protections in place while investigations and replacements were paid in some windows [6] [12]. Crucially, available public data mixes errors and fraud and reporting lags by state, so precise counting of “criminal EBT card misuse in calendar year 2023” is not possible from the public datasets cited here; instead, the record shows a marked and damaging uptick in reported theft incidents around late‑2023 that both drove political reaction and exposed program vulnerabilities [1] [2] [5].