The two men approached the ATM at 6 a.m. soon after the state disburses the latest round of cash aid to the lowest-income Californians.
They sported dark clothing one wearing paint-splattered black jeans and the other a zip-up and beanie.
For about eight minutes on the morning of Feb. 2, authorities say, they inserted cloned Electronic Benefit Transfer cards the cards people receiving public benefits use to access their monthly funds into the slot at a U.S. Bank ATM in Tarzana.
The beeps of the machine carried across the street as the machine dispensed stack after stack of other people’s cash.
For over a year, authorities say similar scenes have played out with increasing frequency in Southern California, as a ring of organized criminals has stolen people’s personal EBT card information and pilfered their accounts.
They strike early in the morning of the first few days of every month hours, sometimes minutes after the state deposits benefits onto the cards. They do the same with food stamps, which the state also deposits on EBT cards, then rack up mammoth bills at grocery stores.
Some of the county’s poorest residents will wake up to discover a month of food or rent money they were relying on has vanished even though their EBT card never left their wallet.
In Los Angeles County, officials say more than $19.6 million in EBT benefits were stolen in 2022 a more than 20-fold increase from the year before, when the county lost less than $1 million. This January alone, the county lost over $2.9 million a one-month record.
They’re hemorrhaging money, said L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Alex Karkanen, who works in the public assistance fraud division, referring to the county. It’s just got to be stopped.
But no one quite knows how.
Some advocates and public benefit attorneys want the state to move faster to make the cards more secure, upgrading EBT cards to the chip or tap technology that is now standard on most credit cards. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors passed a motion last month asking the county’s Department of Public Social Services to lobby for cards with chips, which would make people’s personal account information harder to steal.
Jason Montiel, a spokesperson for the California Department of Social Services, said the agency is considering the technology but doesn’t have a timeline. The upgrade would require “complex technological and statutory changes,” he added.
Nicholas Ippolito, a bureau director for the county’s social services department, said he was told by the state it could take up to 30 months to upgrade EBT cards, which the county is “not very happy about.”