Anthony Anderson has been unmasking “military posers” on his website Guardian Of Valor for the past three years. But the moment he glimpsed the video of a former infantryman angrily confronting a wannabe serviceman trying to pass himself off as an Army ranger at a shopping mall in Pennslyvania on Black Friday, he knew a few fans of his site might find it interesting.
“It really holds your attention,” Anderson recalls thinking while viewing the clip of Army veteran Ryan Berk denouncing a pudgy 30-year-old man in Army fatigues – later identified as Sean Yetman – as he pretends to be a decorated combat veteran.
Over the past three weeks, nearly four million viewers have watched the three-minute-long video of Yetman, who is now being investigated by police and the U.S. Army for violating the Stolen Valor Act of 2013 that makes it a crime for people to pass themselves off as war heroes by wearing medals they didn’t earn.
For Anderson, the incident involving Yetman – one of 48 fake soldiers he has outed – is just the tip of the iceberg.
“This sort of thing is skyrocketing – it’s really an epidemic,” says Anderson, an Army staff sergeant who served in Afghanistan.
“People don’t recognize just how bad it is. It goes way beyond this guy walking around a mall trying to get a military discount.”
One of the most egregious cases involves a 33-year-old Florida man who spent a year in jail – after being exposed on Anderson’s site in 2012 – for fraud while posing as a decorated Marine.
“He got out jail, and it wasn’t long before we got reports that he was doing it again,” says Anderson, 36, who lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
In 2013, Guardian Of Valor made headlines when American Idol contestant Matthew Farmer admitted that his tale of suffering from a life-threatening war injury “was all lies” on Anderson’s website.
“He told the judges his stutter was caused by a grenade explosion, but some guys who served with him in Iraq reached out to say it was actually caused by an overdose of acne medication and alcohol,” explains Anderson, who has a backlog of “thousands” of potentially bogus soldiers that he hopes to eventually look into.
Some of his “investigations” can take six months of legwork to complete. Not that Anderson, who works on his website in his off hours and on weekends, is complaining.
“What these guys are doing,” he says, “is a slap in the face for all those men and women who have sacrificed so much.”
