Carla Brambila checked her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program account just after 5 a.m. on the day her benefits post, as she does every month, and found only $3 left where $1,023 should have been. The single, stay-at-home mother of five had planned to buy ingredients for tamales and soups, plus apple juice for her 5-year-old, on October 4. Instead, she discovered someone had stolen $1,020 from her account.
“Somebody used my card to order online, and they used all my benefits,” Brambila said, according to Phoenix New Times, which first reported her story. She suspects someone stole her card information, and the theft could not have come at a worse time: her children, who range in age from 8 months to 14 years, were home for fall break when she discovered the drained account.
Brambila has received disability benefits since a 2019 car accident broke her spine, an injury that left her bedridden and in a wheelchair before she relearned to walk. She lives in a two-bedroom Phoenix apartment with her mother, her children and a nephew. After the theft, she leaned on her mother and two food pantries, along with nightly dinners at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in south Phoenix. Her mother bought about $150 in groceries for the family in late October. Brambila calls her mother her backbone.
A Nationwide Pattern of Stolen Benefits
Brambila's case fits a much larger pattern. SNAP cards still carry a magnetic strip and lack embedded microchips, technology that credit and debit cards abandoned years ago in favor of chips and tap-to-pay. According to ProPublica, these cards still rely on 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read, letting thieves clone cards and steal account information. ProPublica's reporting, drawing on data from the payments company Propel, found that $470 million was stolen electronically from SNAP beneficiaries nationwide in 2025 alone.
That figure dwarfs the amount attributed to fraud by recipients themselves. Government estimates put intentional SNAP fraud by beneficiaries at less than 1%, or about $64 million a year, out of all benefits issued — a separate category from the electronic theft losses. A Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General report cited by Phoenix New Times found that SNAP theft may have caused losses of $233 million in benefits over the prior two years. In one case the same investigation described, a group known as the Red Bull Crew used stolen account information and PINs tied to at least 174 victims nationwide to buy more than $305,000 worth of energy drinks.
A proposed chip-card program meant to curb the theft has stalled. The Congressional Budget Office has not produced a formal cost estimate, but Hill staffers have pegged the proposal at roughly $215 million — a fraction of the more than $600 million lost annually to theft involving SNAP and other benefits, per ProPublica's reporting. Six states currently participate in a government pilot program for microchipped SNAP cards, and eight states use them altogether, but Arizona has not adopted microchipped cards of its own.
Arizona's Steepest-in-the-Nation Decline
The theft comes as Arizona's SNAP rolls have already collapsed. Arizona experienced a 52% decline in the number of SNAP recipients, the steepest drop in the nation, according to Phoenix New Times's reporting. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities separately estimated that Arizona's SNAP participation fell nearly 51% from July 2025 to July 2026, with the decline easing slightly to 45% through September 2026 using more recent state data, a drop the organization called part of fallout from the Republican reconciliation law enacted July 4, 2025. That law shifted new SNAP costs onto states, expanded work requirements, and ended eligibility for some people with lawful immigration status, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nationwide, the group estimated SNAP participation fell by 5.5 million people, or 13%, between the law's enactment and July 2026, with the number of children receiving SNAP falling by 1.5 million since July 2025 across the 28 states with available data.
Beyond the raw numbers, applicants and recipients have faced unanswered calls and more onerous documentation requests, and technicalities have prevented some otherwise eligible people from receiving or keeping their benefits, per the same Phoenix New Times account. For a program that has helped low-income families bolster grocery budgets for nearly 90 years, delivered through debit-like cards usable at grocery stores and farmers markets, the combination of shrinking rolls and vulnerable card technology has left families like Brambila's with fewer places to turn when something goes wrong.
Few Options for Families Whose Benefits Are Stolen
Federal law offers little recourse for theft that happened when Brambila's did. The USDA's replacement-benefits dashboard states that the statutory authority to replace stolen SNAP benefits with federal funds expired on December 20, 2024, meaning benefits stolen on or after December 21, 2024, are not eligible for federal replacement, according to the Food and Nutrition Administration. A Congressional Research Service summary further notes that protections covering unauthorized credit- and debit-card transactions do not extend to EBT cards, and that SNAP's permanent law provides no ongoing federal funding to replace stolen benefits.
Arizona's Department of Economic Security, which administers SNAP in the state, gave Brambila a new card but would not restore the money she lost for the month. Brambila is not alone in reporting drained benefits: at least six Arizona families told AZFamily that their EBT accounts had been drained in suspicious transactions appearing to originate at a Sun City market, including Leanna Smith, who shared a screenshot of a transaction that wiped out her account at 2:07 a.m. DES confirmed to the station that its Office of the Inspector General is investigating that case.
For Brambila, the bureaucratic fixes have not erased the fear of it happening again, or the frustration of watching a program meant to feed her children become a target for thieves. “I wish the government could do better. They know we struggle, but they don’t want to provide more help for us,” she said, according to Phoenix New Times's reporting on a broader package examining the fallout Arizona has seen after federal food-assistance cuts.
