Elon Musk warned that the United States may be facing "hundreds, maybe thousands" of organized fraud rings stealing taxpayer-funded benefits, following a report highlighting networks that target Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program accounts through skimming attacks on Electronic Benefit Transfer cards.

"There hundreds, maybe thousands, of fraud rings of almost every nationality stealing money from US taxpayers," Musk wrote on X on September 21, responding to a post from The Wall Street Journal. Musk's specific numerical estimate has not been independently verified by federal agencies. The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan federal watchdog that has studied the issue, says perpetrators of SNAP fraud range from individual actors to organized crime groups, but the agency does not publish a nationwide count of active fraud rings.

Musk's comments come amid a series of confirmed federal prosecutions targeting organized EBT card skimming operations in recent years. In April, the Justice Department charged five Romanian citizens in an alleged conspiracy to steal nearly $1 million in SNAP benefits across Ohio and California. Prosecutors said the group installed physical skimming devices on payment terminals, captured EBT magnetic-stripe data and personal identification numbers from unsuspecting benefit recipients, and then encoded that stolen........

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