Federal agents say a Southern California food truck racked up more than $640,000 in SNAP redemptions, dwarfing every nearby competitor, while its owner allegedly handed undercover officers cash in exchange for swiping their EBT cards.
Esmeralda Soriano, 48, the owner of Soriano Produce in Santa Ana, California, faces two counts of illegal trafficking in SNAP benefits after a federal investigation uncovered what prosecutors describe as a brazen scheme to convert taxpayer-funded food assistance into cash. Homeland Security Investigations agents ran undercover operations at the food truck in May, and Soriano is now out of custody on a $5,000 bond ahead of an August 13 arraignment at the United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles.
The numbers that triggered the probe tell the story on their own. From April 2025 to April 2026, Soriano Produce averaged $151.41 per SNAP transaction, more than eight times the California statewide average of $17.72 for a fruits-and-vegetables vendor, federal filings show. Three other nearby vendors averaged below $55 per transaction over the same period.
Soriano Produce did not just post high per-transaction averages. Its total SNAP dollar volume topped $640,000, more than six times the nearest competitor, even though the truck logged more than 9,700 fewer individual transactions than the closest store. A dozen EBT-SNAP purchases at the truck exceeded $1,000 each.
Those figures alone raised red flags. Dwight Llewellyn, the Homeland Security Investigations agent who contributed to the federal complaint, laid out the math plainly:
"Based on my training and experience, the lack of scanners, coupled with consistent high-dollar transactions, and rapid back-to-back transactions, are indicators of possible fraud."
The indictment echoed the same point, noting that the truck's countertop checkout area carried food and non-food items but used a single device to process every SNAP transaction, with no barcode scanners in sight. Rapid, back-to-back high-dollar swipes on the same terminal painted a picture of benefits being converted to cash rather than groceries.
Fraud in federal benefit programs is not limited to small operators. Major retail chains have faced tens of millions of dollars in penalties for billing taxpayers inflated prices through government programs, a reminder that the incentive to game public funds spans every level of the marketplace.
Federal agents moved beyond the data and sent undercover officers directly to the truck. During the first operation in May, Soriano allegedly accepted $100 in SNAP benefits from an officer's EBT card and handed back $50 in cash, a straight fifty-cents-on-the-dollar exchange. No groceries changed hands.
A second undercover visit later that month yielded a similar result. Soriano allegedly swiped an officer's EBT card for $172 and returned $80 in cash. The exchange rate was worse for the cardholder the second time around, but the mechanics were the same: benefits in, cash out.
One remark attributed to Soriano during the operations stood out. She allegedly told the undercover officer:
"If you come back, don't ask my husband because he would not do it."
That single sentence suggests Soriano understood the transactions were illegitimate and wanted to keep them hidden even within her own household. Federal filings do not indicate whether her husband has been charged or investigated.
If convicted on both counts, Soriano faces a maximum sentence of ten years in federal prison. She is currently free on a $5,000 bond, a modest sum given the scale of the alleged fraud. No attorney for Soriano has made a public statement, and federal filings do not indicate whether the food truck has been shut down or had its SNAP authorization revoked.
The case fits a broader pattern of individuals exploiting positions of financial trust to siphon money that belongs to someone else, in this instance, American taxpayers funding a safety net meant to put food on the table for people who need it.
California officials have estimated that SNAP fraud across the state runs into the tens of millions of dollars. The Soriano Produce case illustrates how a single small vendor, operating out of a food truck rather than a brick-and-mortar store, can allegedly move more than half a million dollars in benefits without triggering an immediate shutdown. Federal investigators eventually caught the anomaly in the data, but only after the truck had been redeeming benefits at that pace for at least a year.
The scheme also highlights a structural vulnerability in the SNAP system. Authorized retailers process EBT transactions through their own terminals with minimal real-time oversight. When a vendor lacks barcode scanners and processes every sale through a single device, there is no automated check matching the dollar amount swiped to actual inventory sold. The fraud indicators Llewellyn described, no scanners, high-dollar swipes, rapid back-to-back transactions, are patterns that surface only after the fact, in data reviews, rather than at the point of sale.
Federal enforcement actions against businesses that rack up massive liabilities through fraud or regulatory violations often arrive long after the damage is done. The question in cases like Soriano's is whether the system can catch the next scheme faster, or whether the next food truck will run the same play for another twelve months before anyone notices.
Taxpayers foot the bill for SNAP benefits on the promise that the money feeds families. When a vendor allegedly pockets that money and hands back cash at a discount, every dollar lost is a dollar that never reached its intended purpose. The arraignment is set for August 13.
A program designed to feed the hungry works only if the people authorized to run it are honest. When they are not, the people who suffer most are the taxpayers who fund it and the families who depend on it.