BEAUMONT \u2014 KFDM has received a flood of calls and emails from Southeast Texas families who say criminals drained their Lone Star Card SNAP benefits \u2014 leaving them without money to buy food.<\/p>\n
Those families are victims of benefit theft. So are taxpayers, who fund the programs.<\/p>\n
Texas Health and Human Services Inspector General Raymond Charles Winter told state lawmakers this summer that national estimates indicate up to 10% of health and human services spending is lost to waste, fraud and abuse.<\/p>\n
When Medicaid and SNAP fraud are included, Winter estimated criminals are taking Texas taxpayers on a $5 billion ride each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that means $5.3 billion in Texas does not go where it’s intended to go,\u201d Winter told lawmakers. \u201cThat’s not only a theft from taxpayers. It means that Texas citizens who so desperately need these services are not getting them,” he said in a May 5 hearing.<\/p>\n
The estimate includes Medicaid fraud, which Waste Watch will examine next week.<\/p>\n
For SNAP, also known as food stamps, the Texas Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General identifies three primary types of fraud:<\/p>\n
Client fraud: A person lies or withholds information to receive benefits they do not qualify for.Trafficking: Someone exchanges SNAP benefits for cash.Benefits theft: Criminals use skimming, hacking or account takeovers to steal benefits from a recipient\u2019s card.<\/p>\n
That last category has become a painful reality for families whose Lone Star Card accounts have been compromised.<\/p>\n
The inspector general\u2019s office says potential future safeguards include adding chips to Lone Star Cards and enabling multi-factor authentication.<\/p>\n
Anyone who believes their EBT or Lone Star Card has been compromised should call the Lone Star Card Help Desk at 1-800-777-7328 to cancel the card.<\/p>\n
As KFDM has reported, SNAP benefits stolen through EBT card skimming on or after Dec. 21, 2024, cannot be replaced because of cuts in federal funding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEAUMONT \u2014 KFDM has received a flood of calls and emails from Southeast Texas families who say criminals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-436193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436193","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=436193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}