Fraud against government programs

First keep in mind that fraud is intentional and different from payment errors.

Fraud against government programs is nothing new and neither are the government’s efforts to combat it.

Don’t be mislead by the rhetoric.

The current administration’s publicity about fraud is more political than practical. It results in a great deal complaining, demonizing the programs and the beneficiaries, but at the same time cutting back on the agency’s tasked with identifying fraud.

The administrations target is not fraud as such, but the existence of the social safety net programs which are counter to its small government, individual empowerment ideology.

Fraud is committed by criminal organizations, by providers of services, by contractors to various programs, not significantly by the individuals who are the beneficiaries of the programs.

• In fiscal year 2010 alone, states conducted 782,945 SNAP fraud investigations, disqualified 44,483 individuals, and collected $287 million in recipient claims, of which $67.2 million was related to fraud. The federal government had collected more than $1.3 billion in delinquent SNAP recipient claims since 1992 — but that figure spans nearly two decades, not just 2000–2010, and mixes fraud with non-fraud errors. USDAUSDA
• Notable individual cases from that window include large-scale Medicare/Medicaid fraud rings — for instance, an Armenian-American organized crime network exposed in 2010 that had submitted over $163 million in false claims and collected roughly $35 million before being caught.

2015 — Then-largest Strike Force takedown
In June 2015, a nationwide takedown across 17 districts charged 243 individuals, including 46 doctors, nurses, and other licensed professionals, in schemes involving approximately $712 million in false Medicare billings — the largest Strike Force takedown to that point by both defendant count and loss amount. HHS Office of Inspector General

Other large individual cases (recent years)

• An Arizona nurse practitioner was accused of submitting nearly $209.4 million in fraudulent Medicare claims for amniotic wound grafts applied without medical necessity. Medical Economics
• Five individuals were charged in a $703 million fraud scheme spanning Illinois and Pakistan. Medical Economics
• A separate $1 billion Medicare durable-equipment-and-telemarketing conspiracy and a $142 million Texas genetic-testing fraud case round out recent major prosecutions. Factually

A USDA employee-enabled EBT fraud ring — Southern District of New York, charged May 2025
Six individuals, including a USDA employee, were charged in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme that generated over $66 million in unauthorized SNAP transactions — described by prosecutors as one of the largest food stamp frauds in U.S. history. U.S. Department of Justice

How it worked:

• The scheme dated back to 2019. Lead defendant Michael Kehoe ran a network supplying about 160 unauthorized EBT terminals to stores across the New York City area — including smoke shops — which processed more than $30 million in illegal EBT transactions. FEDagent
• The group submitted fraudulent USDA applications, lied about license numbers, and in some cases altered application documents to get terminals approved for stores that weren’t authorized to accept SNAP. FEDagent

Despite these high-profile cases, fraud within SNAP is relatively rare — the shift from paper coupons to EBT cards in the late 1990s made benefits harder to misuse, and SNAP fraud declined from about 4 cents on the dollar in 1993 to roughly 1 cent by 2006, staying low in the years since. Yahoo!