Across the city of Las Vegas, agents wearing navy blue vests, reading state police and U.S.S. police enter gas stations, grocery stores and the bodegas. They're carrying out a widespread coordinated action called Operation Sandblast.

I'll never forget some of the images I saw when I was participating in Sandblast with the Secret Service.

Haywood Telco, CEO of LexisNexis.

You go to these bodegas in really rough parts of town. You look around the stores and all the food is expired.

Like movie sets, shelves of food nobody was really meant to buy.

I saw a box of Kellogg's raisin brand that had expired in 2015. Right, that was there in case they got inspected or someone was walking around from USDA so the store looked

appropriate.

These stores were not concerned with selling everything on their shelves. The expired food was just a guise for SNAP fraud.

You may know of SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,

by its more colloquial name, Food Stamps.

A Bodega can engage in food stamp fraud in any number of ways.

Some allow customers to trade their government benefits for cash, for example by charging their

electronic benefit transfer cards, EBTs, say $100, and giving the

customer $75 from the register.

Or if a bodega has rows of expired food on its shelves, it may be because they're actually focused on selling more lucrative items that don't qualify for SNAP, like alcohol at a premium and ringing it up as regular food.

So you use your government money to purchase, say, a bottle of cheap vodka, but the cash here brings it up as raisin brand. Everyone wins.

And the purpose of Operation Sandblast actually had to do with a whole other kind of snapfraud funneled through stores like these,

a threat far more consequential, sending millions of stolen taxpayer dollars every year to cyber criminals.

More importantly, it's causing millions of men, women and children to go hungry. The Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons malicious life. In the years leading up to 1910, an industrial chemist Fritz Haber and a chemical engineer, Carl Bosch, came up with a unique chemical

recipe. They took nitrogen, right out of the air we breathe and hydrogen from natural gas and mixed and squeezed it together with the help of a catalyst, iron.

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