Posted on 10/18/2026 2:53:40 AM PDT by know.your.why
I went undercover in Seattle to expose food stamp (EBT) fraud and filmed a $120 EBT card being rung up for one can of Spam and a pack of sushi. A tip from a man on the street led us to a market, a confrontation on camera, and a stolen gun that sent a mob after our security.
Food stamps are supposed to feed people who are struggling. On the streets of Seattle, people told us EBT cards get sold for cash at a fraction of their value, with the cash often going straight to drugs, and we found cards scattered through homeless encampments. I teamed up with citizen journalists Jonathan Choe, Grant and Darren to go undercover as sellers, follow the trail, and see who is allegedly cashing in on a program paid for with your tax dollars.
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This kind of stuff has been going on forever.
Even when one had to show up in person to get their funds,
No sooner than they have them in hand. They would trade barter sell cheap. The food they brought for booze drugs.
The people running the program didn’t/don’t care not their money.
Easy Peasy. EBT equals monthly drug tests. 3rd strike and never again.
Bkmk
Knew a guy back in the day bought EBT cards from several people each month for pennies on the dollar. He ate like a king.
Yet another government dependency tool to keep people enslaved and voting D. The fraud has become a feature instead of a sign of failure. Marxists call it compassion by pointing to how many people are “helped”.
This is a great argument to swap this system out for boxes of food - bread, peanut butter, oatmeal, margarine, apples and a gallon of milk.
Being hungry when I was in my early 20’s pushed me into doing greater things with my life. And there was no welfare back then.
If you end all government welfare programs you can’t have fraud.
In the early 1980’s I worked for our welfare department as an account clerk in the Food Stamp Dept. Back when we used to issue ATP’s and then they had to take the ATP to the post office to trade them in for the actual vouchers called food stamps. We issued a lot of General Deliverys. If the GD’s weren’t picked up at the post office by a certain date every month the ATP’s would come back to our office and the recipient would have to come in to the office to pick them up. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d give them the ATP and they’d head straight to the post office to ‘cash’ them in and be back at our back door of the office at 5 pm when we walked out trying to sell them to us. lol
What should be done to put the benefits on the cards on a day-by-day (or week-by-week basis) so there typically won’t be hundreds of dollars on a card.
The benefits are distributed electronically nowadays so day-by-day distribution is practical.
“Food insecurity” would vanish. Every morning would bring food buying power.
If the card is sold off, it would have to be replaced.
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Stores typically have security cameras and records of transactions.
Audits might be interesting, and unpleasant.
> If you end all government welfare programs you can’t have fraud.<
They’ve already found a way around that. NGOs.
EC
“This is a great argument to swap this system out for boxes of food - bread, peanut butter, oatmeal, margarine, apples and a gallon of milk.”
The only human labor Walmart need use is to put the food out. One can check out using a card and a scanning machine.
Each product in a store typically has a product code. A store (or its checkout scanner) can match product codes to federal regulations.
SNAP is supposed to be temporary.
One’s Social Security future benefits might be debited over ten years for the amount of SNAP benefits obtained.
No more free lunch (and dinner, breakfast, etc.)
Here in SoCal, EBT cards are used to fund sidewalk restaurants of which there are thousands, at least 20 within 2 miles of my shop.
There’s no Constitutional authority to run a free food program. How about eliminating it entirely, and the truly needy can go to their church food bank instead.
Yes it has. A friend of mine was purchasing food stamps for cash in 1974 in Cleveland.
If you end all government welfare programs you can’t have fraud.
True that but you can cantrol it better and thus cut down on the tax
expenses paid by workers. jmo
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