ATLANTA — SNAP recipient Kalice Jefferson says she’s stressed trying to figure out how to pay to feed her family of eight.
“I’m tired because there’s no answers,” Jefferson said.
She told Channel 2’s investigative reporter Ashli Lincoln that for four months she’s been waiting to get money back from the Georgia Department of Human Services after thieves hacked into her SNAP account and took nearly $6,000 since November.
“Most of my transactions were out of New York and Pennsylvania,” she said.
For Eureka Slaughter, a Locust Grove mother of two, she told Lincoln that she also had her benefits stolen from New York, and the state of Georgia has not replaced them yet.
“We’re going two months without groceries if somebody don’t help us ... $750 was stolen off of my food stamps card,” Slaughter said.
In December, the Department of Human Services launched the Gateway EBT app and website. it allows SNAP recipients to be able to lock their cards, to prevent these types of thefts from happening.
But Jefferson said the thieves are so savvy and fast, that her account gets hacked as soon as she lifts the lock to pay for purchases.
“Now here I have a whole bag of groceries, I call the number, and stamps are completely gone within seconds,” Jefferson said.
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Channel 2 Action News reached out to the state, which said it is currently looking into this.
State law says a household may not receive more than two replacement issuances for stolen benefits in a federal fiscal year.
Channel 2 Action News learned states are issuing these federal replacement dollars under the previous Congress.
The deadline for that relief expired in December under the Consolidated Appropriations Act. It was passed in 2022 as EBT card thefts were on the rise.
Right now, the state has provided little direction to SNAP recipients who have had benefits stolen in January and February.
On the Department of Human Services website, it says benefits stolen after December are not eligible for replacement funds at this time.
A state spokesperson sent Lincoln a statement, saying:
“The state has no further recourse with the end of this federal program. This was a federally instituted and funded program that the previous Congress opted to no longer fund, making SNAP benefits stolen on or after Dec. 21, 2024, ineligible for replacement. We continue to remind customers who think they’ve been the victim of card skimming, card cloning, or other similar fraud involving their public benefits to change their PIN and lock or replace their card immediately and then report the incident to the DHS Office of Inspector General at inspectorgeneralhotline@dhs.ga.gov or 877-423-4746, option 6.”
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