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Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a "#UtopiaOfRules" (as #DavidGraeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:
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(The right *says* it wants to "shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub - and then drown it" - but not the *whole* government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping "DENIED" on every claim.)
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The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system - but it's a *highly selective* form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against *itself*, with no thought to protecting *benefits recipients themselves* from fraud.
And those recipients - by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us - are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud.
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These benefits are distributed via debit cards - #EBTCards - that lack the basic security measures every other kind of card has had for years. They're simple magstripe cards, lacking basic #ChipAndPin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.
That means that fraudsters can - and do - install #skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using #SNAP (AKA #FoodStamps), and receive other benefits.
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It's impossible to overstate how widespread skimmers are, and how much criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for *#Businessweek*, #JessicaFu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:
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One of Fu's sources, #LexisNexisRiskSolutions's #HaywoodTalcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a "glorified hotel room key." He recounts how US police departments saw a *massive* explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.
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The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers - working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer - don't know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients' accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.
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These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of #RedBull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim's entire SNAP balance.
Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who's running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end.
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Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.
Indeed, that's why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century "glorified hotel room key" territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: #IncentivesMatter.
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