EBT card glitch causes Food Stamp shopping spree in Walmart

Story.

On Saturday there was a glitch that removed the purchase limits on EBT cards, causing the customers to be allowed to purchase an unlimited amount of food. Shortly after this was discovered, customers in Louisiana were coming into Walmarts purchasing as much food as they could, some leaving with multiple carts at a time.

Other supermarkets stopped accepting EBT cards until the glitch was fixed while Walmart's corporate office told them not to stop. Around nine that evening an employee at one of the Walmarts went on the intercom announcing that the credit limits were restored. Many customers abandoned their carts in place with the food still in them.

In my opinion, stuff like this is what gives honest people who are on SNAP a bad name. Where I grew up in Atlanta I knew of a few people who sold food they bought with Food Stamps for cash and while the article didn't mention it chances are that's where the majority of that food went.

Should Walmart have stopped the customers from buying food with their EBT cards like the other supermarkets did? Or were they right to let them continue buying food? Keep in mind near the end of the story a spokeswoman mentions that in the event of a glitch each cardholder is supposed to have a $50 dollar limit in Louisiana that Walmart didn't abide by.

I don't get it. The food was free or they were simply able to rack up a huge debt on their cards?

I know a sure fire way to ensure that those people who overspent do not get more than they should, freeze all the accounts who had purchases totaling more than their limits for the period of time it takes to make up for what they spent. If someone only has a $150 limit (usually a single person) and they spent $450 on groceries, freeze the account for three months and do not give them any food stamps until then. Those with families might have it hard for a couple of months, but they had a chance to be honest, yet they weren't. On top of that, Wal-Mart should have their ability to accept EBT rescinded for a year as a way to punish them for not halting the use of the cards until the problem was fixed.

Do you really expect people that got themselves into a situation where they need food stamps to be, on the whole, an honest group?

A glitch in the software at Xerox lifted the limit on each card. Once word spread that people could overspend their limits, people were spending taxpayer dollars on food and Walmart let them do it. EBT benefit card glitch sparks Walmart shopping sprees in Louisiana has more to the story.

Right, so it wasn't their money. Hang them.

Hence my suggestion that their food stamps be suspended until such time as what they normally would have gotten has transpired. If they spent three months worth of taxpayer money on food, then they do not get food stamps for three months.

That's an easy fix. Next month you just deduct what they over spent and every month after until they have paid it off.

Reading some of the comments on that website, while the outrage is justified for people taking advantage of the glitch, some of the comments were flat out racist against black people. Then another one excused the actions of the shoppers by saying rich people on Wall Street would have done the same if a Wall Street error allowed them to cash in.

:|

Oh, right, we can't make faces anymore. I'll have to settle with verbally expressing my belief that your statement was fucking idiotic.

Is that not exactly what they've done? The difference between these people and the Wall Street bankers is these people did it to eat.

Totally right. Because working at a job getting minimum wage trying to pay off student loans is a miserable excuse of a human being. And it's even more terrible if they need a vehicle to get to work or have an apartment in which to live. The whole program should be eliminated. They made the decision to go to college and try to improve their lives, and it's their own fault that they live in an economically depressed area.

They shouldn't even be allowed to be citizens in this nation.

/sarcasm

That's pathetic. I sure wish people could be honest. They are already being given free food every month and then they have to go and do stuff like this. Everyone who did this should have an automatic 6 month hold placed on their card. Maybe an empty stomach will teach them not to steal.

Walmart should not have allowed it, and the individuals should not have taken advantage of it.

Wow, was it a long trip to here from your seventeenth-century serfdom?

It certainly wasn't Wal-marts fault. The register doesn't tell you how much money is available on the card. Hell, it's the customer who slides their own card, the cashier doesn't even see the card so there's no way to know a person is even using food stamps. It probably took a customer realizing that their card was charged more than they had available and informing a member of management.

A family of four doesn't need seven shopping carts full of food to eat. It's dead obvious a lot of that food is being resold for cash but the news was too politically correct to say it. More than likely it was because they were scared of being called racist for pointing out an obvious scam that has been going on since Food Stamps first came out.

One scam people in my old neighborhood did before Food Stamps were dumped for EBT cards was they would sell around $100 bucks in stamps for $50-$75 in cash to somebody who wasn't eligible for stamps themselves. After the EBT card came out people would just give a shopping list to people they wanted to buy food for them and then pay them for the food directly.

Two wrongs don't make a right, if the guys on Wall Street are willing to cheat people that doesn't make it okay for for the lower class to commit fraud. People like them are the main reason some people are pushing to lower or get rid of SNAP while stereotyping EBT card holders as deadbeats.

Well, the article says that other supermarkets stopped accepting them, so Walmart could have as well presumably. Or put a $50 maximum on purchases that used them.

Probably not. After all, he left out the stocks and the amputations. Unnecessary and unwarranted thievery should not be tolerated in the manner it is in this nation.

Yeah, I just perused some of them and yeah, one idiot stands out. Neither group would be justified in doing that if they did that. Walmart should have stopped taking the cards the minute they found out that there was a problem. Still, as I stated before, those that spent more than they are entitled to should forfeit all future benefits until they reach a point in which they would have received that same amount no matter how long it takes. If it keeps them off food stamps for 3 months or more, let that be a lesson. The only other alternative is to cancel their benefits and not allow them to ever receive them again.

I highly doubt people are buying more food than they need and going out to sell it for a profit in the streets.

"Hey, man. You got the good stuff?"

"Yeah, dude, check it. I got carrots, apples, asparagus. Buck-fifty a pound."

"The hell, man?!"

"Hey, guy's gotta make a profit. Now pay up or bounce, yo."

Get Vince Gilligan on this, ASAP! We can call it, "Breaking Bread." It'll run for seven seasons and star the guys from Veggie Tales.

Was a typo, get over it.

Actually, you have to press the EBT button on the card reader as well as tell the cashier due to food bought with food stamps is not taxable. The cashier has to hit a button on the register to remove said tax and so non-food items are not charged to the card.

Those types of food aren't the only ones eligible for purchase. Think of it this way: buy sixteen cases of soda for $7 each at retail. You have no cost. Sell them for $3 each. The other person is getting a heck of a bargain, and you just made $50 off of the sucker taxpayers.

It's pretty rich how you're always denigrating the intelligence of conservatives but then type this nonsense which sounds just like something an ignorant rightwinger would spew.

Won't the money be deducted from their stamps in the future months? It's a bummer people take advantage of the Food Stamps program

I'm not repeating some crap I read on some anti-poor website that loves to drag people on government assistance in the dirt. I was raised in a lower class family and saw things like this happen in person. Usually it was something as simple as selling stamps for gas money to get to work, which you can almost overlook. On the other hand, you had people selling stamps for booze money or even drug money.

ITT: OT hates on the less fortunate. Some of you need to get your heads examined considering the spiteful things said in this topic. God forbid people try to get more food to feed their families.

If anything, selling a hundred dollars worth of food for fifty bucks in cash may be doing the opposite. Plus it gives politicians ammo to push for a reduction in benefits.

I work at Walmart and can confirm on Saturday there was a glitch in the system BUT at our walmart we only let people have an $80 dollar limit on food purchases MAX. we did not let people get away with stealing $500 in food.

Am i proud of myself for working at walmart? not really. BUT i dont like it when there is mis information out their and people are to stupid to do some research on it.

That's a very small portion of the people. Florida implemented drug test and all it did was waste tax payer money.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/07/more-states-consider-welfare-drug-testing-bills/

Drugs being more prevalent in men; it's a minuscule number that cheat the system as the majority of Food stamp users are women.

• Among adult participants, 57 percent are women and 43 percent are men.
• http://dss.sd.gov/foodstamps/faq/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430124/

So was Wal-Mart supposed to punish those who were actually honest by denying their cards as well?

They (Wal-Mart, not the thieves) did the right thing by allowing purchases to continue. Let the government sort it... you know, I almost made it through that sentence with a straight face.

Also... is there an investigation into that "glitch?" Seems mighty suspicious that the software just "accidentally" glitched out and pulled the limits.

They should not have said anything and let them face embarrassment when they tried to swipe their card and it gets declined. I think then it would make those that ever try it again think twice of the shame of trying to take even more advantage of the system and some already do. Not everyone that is on programs like those honestly should be.

@OrkHammer007: Walmart could have just enforced the $50 limit that was mentioned in the story. Even if the limit was only good for that particular transaction and didn't block them for the whole day it could have at least slowed them down. Besides, the EBT cards were only malfunctioning for ten hours, the generator went out at 11 AM and by 9 PM the limits were back on. You can't tell me they would have starved to death in that short amount of time.

And people say those on food stamps are unintelligent.

@Fightingfan: Drug testing people who are applying for government assistance may have good intentions, but it's not going to be very effective. Not unless they take the military method of drug testing, which is making it completely random and having an observer watching you urinate so they can make sure you aren't using fake urine. Personally I could care less if they want to smoke a joint, but using food stamp money to buy their bud is a little over the line.

Also, I've been around Food Stamps long enough to know that women who are on them will use their benefits to feed their boyfriends if their boyfriends aren't on them too.

These people are flat out thieves and should be arrested. Of course nothing will happen to them even though it would be absolutely simple to track down them down since they, you know, used their cards and are on video. These folks obviously feel like they can steal and commit fraud with impunity and brazenly commit crimes...which says a lot about our welfare system and how we enforce the rules.

Scum of the Earth IMO...they get free money/food as it is yet still try and rip people off given the chance.

See, I do. I'm paying for their food. And instead of using their own money to buy the food, they use it for weed, coke, tattoos, and alcohol. They aren't using the food stamps per se, but they are using the money that they would be using if they had to pay for their own food.

With my student loans and crappy job, I can't afford to do anything. If I eat at a restaurant, it's a $1 burger at McDonald's; that's my budget. And it just irks me when I see a 22-year-old with three kids to three different men who doesn't work due to a 'mental disorder' on disability driving two hours to a city where she's getting the brand-new Skylanders game and about ten figures for her kids. I want to buy stuff that I can enjoy, not buy stuff for her kids.

walmart skrewed up by continuing to honor the system after it was known there were no limits, they could have stopped accepting EBT transactions until the service was fully restored. i doubt they care though as they'll surely be made whole by the gov't for any over-limit transactions that occurred.

Right, the individual's theft/fraud is someone else fault since they (Walmart/Xerox/Gov) didn't fix it fast enough and they didn't stop them from doing it.

I mean, I do think Walmart has some culpability here as well...but this is flat out the fault of a bunch of people who literally are biting the hand that feeds them (for free) and brazenly/knowingly ripping off the the gov/tax payers.

Yes, we should let them all starve! Great Idea!

The error was fixed in less than a day...no one was going to starve over this. Even if there was an error but they could still use the cards, racking up $700 worth of items instead of what they were allotted is flat out fraud and has nothing to do with starving. Shameful comment that attempts to excuses the terrible behavior based on a false premise.

They could have enforced the $50 limit, but I have a feeling that people responsible for programming that feature skimped on it, expecting the government to keep its shit together and not glitch the account limits out. Physically enforcing that limit (having several managers at the front to visit each register where an EBT payee was and explain that they would only be able to use that card for up to $50) would have been difficult at best... at worst, it could very well have sparked a riot.

I wouldn't say they'd starve. However, Saturday is a relatively busy shopping day for a reason: for many people, it's the only day they have to actually shop for food. If that type person is there to buy their week's worth of groceries, and gets turned away at the door because the store isn't taking their card, it could cause significant hardship... enough to make them turn to another store to do business, and take several of their friends with them. Better to take the short-term financial hit (if there is one) over allowing EBT purchases than the potential long-term hit from unsatisfied/angry customers.

i'm not excusing the people of any fault in this either, but lets not kid ourselves. this could have easily been avoided by walmart ( as other stores had done ) putting a temporary hold on accepting EBT cards for the period of time that they KNEW the system was not working. humans will look to take advantage of any situation. why do you think walmart has locks on their doors in the first place?

If they try to overspend ours actually says exactly how much they have left to use, and our registers are pretty damned old. Wal-Mart should be forced to pay back the overcharges.

I was talking about the people who said that their food stamp cards should be frozen.

Oh, that reminds me, EBT was down from about 11 AM to 10 PM in Georgia, completely, on that same day. Guess it wasn't just in that state. Seems Georgia simply opted to take EBT down statewide rather than have this kind of situation.

Since WalMart knew of the problem but allowed the sales...they should be liable for all overages.