{"id":123963,"date":"2022-03-16T06:13:44","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T10:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=123963"},"modified":"2022-03-16T06:13:44","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T10:13:44","slug":"how-stolen-valor-was-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=123963","title":{"rendered":"How Stolen Valor Was Discovered"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Sarah Jane Cavanaugh<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There has been quite a bit of news coverage about Sarah Cavanaugh being charged with Stolen Valer for her alleged scheme to defraud people out of money posing as a wounded Marine.<\/p>\n

We wrote about her here: https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=123957<\/a><\/p>\n

This article, however, takes a different slant and focuses on how observant people questioned her story and brought light to it.<\/p>\n

\n

How Sleuths Blew the Lid on Accused Purple Heart Fraudster<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

VA social worker Sarah Jane Cavanaugh delivered an Oscar-worthy performance as a wounded Marine dying of lung cancer\u2014until two actual veterans grew suspicious.<\/em><\/p>\n

A New England woman is accused of posing as a combat-wounded Marine Corps veteran and defrauding various charities out of hundreds of thousands of dollars while faking Stage IV cancer she falsely claimed was due to toxic exposure from burn pits in Iraq as well as an IED blast in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Sarah Jane Cavanaugh, 31, claimed she was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star while serving in the Marines from 2009 to 2016,\u00a0according to a complaint unsealed Monday in Rhode Island federal court. The feds say Cavanaugh, who never served but held down a job as a social worker at a Veterans\u2019 Affairs Medical Center in Providence, falsified official documents she pilfered from patients at the VA to make her story more realistic. To complete the alleged ruse, Cavanaugh talked her way into a position as commander of her local VFW, even\u00a0emceeing an event last year to mark the opening of the state\u2019s Purple Heart Trail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later…<\/p>\n

Cavanaugh turned in an Oscar-worthy performance, said Chelsey Simoni, a registered nurse, Army veteran, and the executive director of the\u00a0HunterSeven Foundation, a Rhode Island-based charity that advocates for post-9\/11 veterans suffering from cancer and other serious medical conditions. But after doing a bit of digging, Simoni eventually realized something wasn\u2019t right about Cavanaugh, who appeared in full Marine Corps uniform at multiple veterans\u2019 events, and in January Simoni took her concerns to authorities.<\/p>\n

When U.S. Marine Corps Major Thomas Schueman first met Cavanaugh a few years back, he was impressed. She appeared \u201cvery compelling, she said all the right words, had all the lingo down,\u201d Schueman recalled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then…<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce or twice, something raised a red flag, but there was something about her that made me push the \u2018I believe\u2019 button and move past it,\u201d Schueman said. \u201cShe said she was a female veteran, and you want to see this great story out of this female veteran.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later on, a hospital bill appeared odd, and a supplied DD-214 had discrepancies – namely a Social Security number that wasn’t Cavanaugh’s.<\/p>\n

By the end of the day, Schueman felt he \u201cknew for a fact\u201d that Cavanaugh didn\u2019t have a Purple Heart or a Bronze Star, and that the Social Security Number on her DD-214 wasn\u2019t hers. When Schueman gave her a chance to come clean, he said Cavanaugh insisted the \u201cdeep state\u201d was out to get her.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had the audacity to call me 24 hours later and ask if I was able to get the money from the donor,\u201d said Schueman, who told Cavanaugh that he was going to have to \u201cpause\u201d the hiring process until he could get to the bottom of things.<\/p>\n

On Jan. 27, Simoni called the VA Medical Center in Providence to report Cavanaugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A very common reaction is to dismiss oddities because it is hard to believe someone would have the audacity to perpetrate such a lie, but eventually, we can accept the fact that people lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been quite a bit of news coverage about Sarah Cavanaugh being charged with Stolen … How Stolen Valor Was Discovered<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":663,"featured_media":123964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[479,184,331,461,408],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bronze-star","category-marine-corps","category-marines","category-purple-heart","category-stolen-valor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/123964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}