MASSIVE EBT & CHARITY FRAUD EXPOSED: Dominican Immigrants in Lawrence, Massachusetts Buying Food with Your Taxpayer-Funded Stamps and Free Charity Donations, Then Shipping It Overseas to Sell for Profit in Santo Domingo Bodegas
Independent investigator Muckraker has blown the lid off a sophisticated, long-running Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) and charity fraud operation in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Dominican immigrants have been openly buying groceries with food stamps (EBT/SNAP cards) or taking free food from charities and food banks, loading it into shipping barrels, and sending it straight to the Dominican Republic — where it gets resold for profit in local bodegas. The pipeline runs from Massachusetts corner stores, through shipping hubs in New York, all the way to Santo Domingo.
According to the Muckraker Foundation:
Lawrence, Massachusetts
Lawrence is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants of any city in Massachusetts, and the highest rate of SNAP enrollment in the state.
John has been delivering goods in Lawrence for over 11 years, six days a week, 35 stops a day. He knows the community intimately.
“I’ve been witnessing the Dominican residents going to food bank lines and collecting non-perishable goods,” he told us, “and then packing it in barrels and in boxes, and then they ship it back to the Dominican Republic.”
We asked him how he knew the food was being purchased with food stamps.
“Some of them have openly told me and my wife that that’s what they’re doing,” he said. “And then the other way is the math.”
The math is straightforward. A 50-pound bag of rice costs $30 in Lawrence. That same bag costs $35 in the Dominican Republic. Add shipping, and the economics make no sense unless the food was free or paid for with government benefits.
John drove us through the streets of Lawrence and showed us the evidence hiding in plain sight: blue shipping barrels, stacked outside corner stores, for sale. Not one store. Not two. Store after store after store.
“These barrels aren’t trash cans,” John said. “They’re being used to ship the product.”
Every one of those stores also advertised, prominently, that they accept EBT.
Abigail has worked in Lawrence since 2011. She asked us not to disclose her profession, but her job takes her inside people’s homes on a daily basis.
“Many of them will have large boxes, large bins in their apartments full of the food that they give out at the pantries here,” she told us. “And when I ask them what it’s for, they say they mail it back so it can either be given to their families there or be sold in the bodegas there.”
We asked if these patients knew they were doing something wrong.
“No,” she said, and laughed quietly. “They feel entitled. They feel like that’s what we come here for.”
We asked how widespread she believed the fraud to be among the patients she visits.
“About half,” she said. “Half the people I see.”
Massachusetts has some of the strictest wiretapping laws in the country, which limited what we could capture on camera. So we moved the investigation to New York.
In the Bronx, we located a storage facility being used by numerous Dominican shipping companies as a distribution hub. We sent in an associate with a hidden camera. A worker confirmed explicitly, on camera, that people are using EBT to purchase the food being shipped in those boxes.
From there, the food moves to Port Newark, one of the largest container terminals on the East Coast. It is from Port Newark that tens of thousands of pounds of food, likely amounting to millions of dollars, is loaded onto ships bound for the Dominican Republic.
Santo Domingo
Inside a small bodega in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, a shop owner told us on camera that the inventory is purchased with EBT cards in New York. The prices on the shelves told the same story. The food was selling for roughly the same price as it does in the United States. After shipping costs, that price only makes sense if the food was obtained for free.
At a second shop in Santo Domingo, the owner told us she gets her inventory from churches in New York City, and that when she goes to collect the food, she uses her Dominican ID and her mother’s American address.
In boxes behind her: Ronzoni pasta, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Goya beans, Quaker oats, and more. Food donated by Americans, intended for Americans, now sitting in a bodega in Santo Domingo.
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