LOS ANGELES—Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles Mar. 2 announced the arrest of 15 people who allegedly used information from “skimmed” electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to make unauthorized withdrawals of funds that had been disbursed to the needy.
More than 300 law enforcement officers early Wednesday began monitoring about 20 ATM locations across the Los Angeles area and identified individuals who were making multiple cash withdrawals with cards encoded with information that had been stolen from cards used by the California Department of Social Services to provide CalFresh and CalWORKs benefits to qualified recipients, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“By stealing public benefits using counterfeit EBT cards, the defendant in these cases plundered the accounts of some of our community’s poorest residents—people who need these benefits to survive,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement….