States Must Block Foreign IP Addresses and Emails to Stop Food Stamp Fraud

Overview

The food stamp program was designed to help truly needy Americans obtain a nutritionally adequate diet, but the program is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.¹ Every dollar stolen is a dollar that does not go to a needy family, and every fake application from a foreign IP address or email domain steals from American taxpayers. The systems that are designed to prevent foreign theft are insufficient and failing.²

Across the country, truly needy families on food stamps are checking out at grocery stores only to be told their funds are gone, stolen by foreign scammers. Scammers are siphoning funds from legitimate food stamp families, draining Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) accounts, and wiring funds overseas. Foreign fraudsters are signing up for welfare themselves using IP addresses in Canada, China, Mexico, and more.³ According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, organized international crime rings are heavily involved in and benefiting from food stamp fraud.⁴

Officially, more than one in every $10 spent on food stamps is in error, but even that figure dramatically understates the problem.^5-6 Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states will be held accountable for some of the cost of their food stamp errors.⁷ States should implement program integrity measures to safeguard their programs. To protect against malicious foreign actors, states must block food stamp applications that are submitted from foreign IP addresses and email domains.

Sophisticated fraud rings exploit American welfare programs

Foreign interference in American welfare programs is not rare. Recent investigations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal that international criminal organizations are heavily involved in and benefit from food stamp fraud.⁸

In August 2025, a Romanian citizen was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his role in a transnational skimming operation.⁹ Working with multiple members of a criminal organization based in Romania, he skimmed tens of thousands of EBT cards in California and New York.¹⁰ At the time of his arrest, he possessed more than $37,000 in cash and nearly 1,500 stolen access device numbers.¹¹ Over a three-year period, he sent a single accomplice more than 36,000 stolen EBT card numbers.¹²

The scale of these operations has only grown. In March of 2026, more than 50 individuals, many with ties to Romania, were charged as part of an organized welfare fraud ring.¹³ A single crackdown sentenced individuals for stealing $4 million from California’s welfare programs.¹⁴ In a roughly three-and-a-half-year period, fraudsters stole $310 million from EBT beneficiaries in California.¹⁵

These funds are often leaving the country. In June 2026, two Venezuelan nationals living in Massachusetts pled guilty to food stamp fraud as part of an organized, ongoing scheme that used the stolen identities of more than 100 people to obtain nearly half a million dollars in benefits.¹⁶ The pair used the funds to purchase bulk food items, resold them at a profit through a restaurant, and wired their fraudulent earnings to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.¹⁷

In April 2026, five foreign nationals, one of whom had already been removed from the country twice, were charged with conspiracy to steal nearly $1 million in food stamps from Ohio and California.¹⁸ The men installed hidden skimming devices on retailers’ card readers, invisibly capturing EBT card data from food stamp households.¹⁹ Additional cases, often involving foreign nationals operating multistate skimming rings, continue to surface.^20-24

These crimes steal funds from truly needy Americans and drain taxpayer resources. Families often must prove their food stamps were stolen, causing delays and personal budget frustrations.²⁵ These examples highlight foreign fraud operations targeting enrollees already in the system. But foreign scammers are also getting into the welfare systems themselves, using foreign IP addresses and email domains.

Foreign fraudsters steal welfare benefits from truly needy Americans using foreign IP addresses and email domains

Foreign fraudsters steal welfare benefits by using foreign IP addresses and email domains to submit fraudulent benefit applications. This type of fraud was rampant during the pandemic, when foreign actors defrauded state unemployment insurance (UI) programs on a massive scale.

In just one state, fake unemployment claims, supposedly from state residents, originated from IP addresses in nearly 170 countries, including China, Cuba, Monaco, Nigeria, and Russia.²⁶ Organized foreign scammers often use bots or outsource the theft to low-wage workers in Bolivia, Brazil, China, Mexico, and West African countries to file fake claims in bulk.²⁷ And although this type of fraud spiked during the pandemic, it is not new.^28-30

The scale of pandemic-era fraud was staggering. The Government Accountability Office estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars were lost to UI fraud during the pandemic and some estimates suggest that up to half of the total benefits issued could have been stolen.^31-32 Lax or nonexistent verification was a key driver. For the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, no verification was required.³³ In one state, 90 percent of UI claims were found to be fraudulent.³⁴

Forty-two percent of states failed to report pandemic UI overpayments as required.³⁵ States that did understated the total by nearly 90 percent.³⁶ Forty-four states outright skipped recommended cross-checks.³⁷

One foreign fraud ring, known as Scattered Canary, illustrates how this type of fraud evolves from small-scale scams into a massive, organized operation. The Nigerian fraud ring grew out of Craigslist scams and went on to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington state’s unemployment system.³⁸ Many other states were similarly attacked, and likely every state was vulnerable to the ring.³⁹ Scattered Canary used stolen Social Security numbers along with foreign and disposable email addresses.⁴⁰ The fraudsters exploited Gmail’s dot-address feature, using look-alike variations of a single address to register multiple accounts that funnel into one inbox, and Yopmail services, disposable email addresses that require no passwords.⁴¹ This allowed the ring to register fraudulent claims across state UI portals while appearing to use American email addresses. Foreign fraud rings take deliberate steps to conceal their foreign origin. Investigations found that the scammers leased U.S. IP addresses to conceal one conspiracy’s connection to Nigeria.⁴²

This type of blatant foreign-based fraud also happens in food stamps, though the full scope is unknown. Analysis of food stamp data from a single state found that many individuals were successfully approved for food stamps while using an IP address linked to a foreign country, from Canada, China, Mexico, and others.⁴³ Moreover, more than 5,000 foreign-based email addresses were used to sign up for food stamps in the state.⁴⁴

Disposable email accounts were also found. In total, more than 20,000 email accounts were flagged as “high” or “very high” risk for fraudulent activity.⁴⁵

The food stamp program lacks simple identity verification procedures that would stop fraudsters from so easily infiltrating state welfare systems.⁴⁶ These, along with frequent residency cross-checks, are essential to rooting out this type of abuse in welfare programs.⁴⁷

States do not sufficiently enforce program integrity in their welfare programs, and fraud is dramatically understated

Reported error rates reveal that more than one in every 10 dollars spent on food stamps is spent in error.⁴⁸ This amounts to more than $10 billion in improper spending each year.⁴⁹ But this figure significantly understates the real waste, fraud, and abuse in the program, as the official rate ignores most erroneous payments; many instances of fraud and improper payments go unnoticed or uninvestigated; and the official rate does not account for food stamp trafficking, intentional program violations, and known fraud.⁵⁰ The true figure is substantially higher.

Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states will now have to share in the cost of their food stamp benefits, based on their error rate.⁵¹ A higher error rate will result in a greater state cost share.⁵² States should have been strengthening their food stamp program integrity all along, but now they have a financial consequence for avoiding accountability.

Data verification reveals widespread abuse in the food stamp program. Analysis from a single state found more than one in five food stamp enrollees did not have their identity successfully matched with the address listed on their application.⁵³ Many others had undeliverable addresses, or addresses registered with a business rather than a residence.⁵⁴ Hundreds of thousands of food stamp enrollees had their most recent verifiable address in another state.⁵⁵ Of those, tens of thousands had no record of ever living in the state where they were collecting benefits.⁵⁶ Beyond that, thousands of food stamp enrollees signed up with Social Security numbers that were unable to be successfully verified, while hundreds had Social Security numbers issued before their date of birth.⁵⁷ Commonsense program integrity measures like regular data cross-checks would reduce these instances of fraud.⁵⁸

The Bottom Line:

States must block food stamp applications submitted from foreign IP addresses and foreign email domains.

States should stop foreign crime syndicates from defrauding American taxpayers. No one living abroad needs American food stamps, and legitimate food stamp applicants are not filing from IP addresses in China, Nigeria, or Romania. States that decline to enforce program integrity measures leave the door open for foreign criminals who have already proven they will walk through it. Applications submitted from IP addresses outside the United States must be automatically blocked or held before any benefits are issued, and applications using foreign email addresses must be rejected outright.

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