The U.S. Secret Service completed a two-day operation in Tarrant County targeting criminals accused of stealing benefits from vulnerable families.<\/p>\n
Agents inspected 319 businesses Monday, April 6, and Tuesday, April 7, that accept SNAP EBT payments, searching for card skimmers placed on point-of-sale devices, ATMs and gas pumps.<\/p>\n
The effort is part of the agency\u2019s Organized Response and Intelligence Operations Nationwide initiative, or ORION, which focuses on combating financial crimes linked to transnational groups.<\/p>\n
Officials said they have seen a nationwide increase in skimming activity over the past two years, with many victims relying on government assistance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’re going to these places because they have no other option and once that money’s gone, a family of four that went there for the first place, they can’t go back because they have they have no money,\u201d said Corey Graves with the Secret Service Dallas Field Office.<\/p>\n
Between the two days of inspections, investigators found 10 skimming devices at Tarrant County stores.<\/p>\n
Authorities collect the devices as evidence and analyze them for fingerprints. If the skimmers include cameras, investigators may also recover video of those who installed them from storage cards inside the devices.<\/p>\n
The Secret Service said each skimmer can steal up to $1 million in funds.<\/p>\n
Nationwide, the agency said it has prevented more than $572 million in fraud losses through the ORION initiative.<\/p>\n
Officials said the latest operation sends a message to those responsible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe may not find you, but we are going to disrupt, we’re going to make it very uncomfortable for your financial gain in return as a result of what you’re doing,\u201d Graves said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U.S. Secret Service completed a two-day operation in Tarrant County targeting criminals accused of stealing benefits from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-250362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arlington","8":"tag-arlington","9":"tag-arlington-headlines","10":"tag-arlington-news","11":"tag-tarrant-county"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}