The shuttering of supermarkets in San Francisco is nothing new but in this particular case some markets might have a new reason to close. SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has charged owners and employees at five separate markets with welfare fraud. Here’s how it worked.
The City of San Francisco, State of California, and federal government provide SNAP benefits to qualified recipients in the form of electronic benefits transfer cards (commonly referred to as “EBT” cards), which can be used to purchase eligible food items. In these criminal cases, the defendants are alleged to have conspired together to obtain EBT cards from program recipients, and then process fraudulent transactions at various retail stores…
In a typical transaction, a “runner” would go to the mid-Market / Tenderloin area of San Francisco and call out “EBT” until the runner…
