Another arrest has been made in the Case of the Food Stamp Millionaires: 71-year old Anup Virk, the father of the man who owns the convenience store at the center of an alleged million-dollar scheme to buy food stamps from their customers at half price, then pocket the difference in reimbursements from the federal government. The Daily Freeman reports:
The father of one of the suspects in a million-dollar food stamp scam was charged Wednesday with illegally obtaining a benefit card and using it in the Midtown Kingston store run by his son...
...Matthews said the house Virk and his sons share is a mansion worth about $1 million.
The Kingston Times ran an interview last month with an anonymous food stamp recipient who was in on the scam. It's a great read -- and implies that the Kingston Sunoco that got busted for this isn't the only one in the food-stamp racket, just one of the most egregious.
But Mary said that she had been flipping stamps at the store for two years before the Nov. 9 raid put an end to the practice. According to Mary, the fraud increased in scope after a night clerk at the 24-hour gas station joined in the scheme.
“It used to be that you could only do it in the daytime from 9 to 4,” said Mary. “Then the other guy got on the bandwagon and it turned into a 24-hour operation.”
According to Mary, patrons of the stamps-for-cash scheme ranged from members of the “bottle gang” who used food stamps to buy beer for parties beneath the Colonel Chandler Drive overpass to struggling families who flipped stamps to pay their rent.
“Some people would use it for drugs, but some people just needed money to pay their rent, or buy toilet paper, or whatever they might need,” said Mary.
And, she said, it was not a practice confined to the Broadway Sunoco station. Mary identified three other small retailers in Kingston which flipped stamps for customers routinely, though more cautiously and for a more select clientele than the gas station.
Downstate in New York City -- where, Mary notes, food stamps trade at a higher premium -- three city welfare workers and an accomplice were arrested today in another food stamp scheme, estimated to have netted them $8 million.
