Men and women in the military learn to put service above self. They form a deeply connected community where men and women from all walks of life must learn to trust each other completely. Their lives depend on it, and so does our national security.

Living this way forges many veterans into great human beings - selfless, honest, trusting, and trustworthy. In other words, the perfect mark for financial predators. 

Take a walk through the towns around any military base, and you’ll see new and used car salesmen offering high APR financing with “no money down” to naive 19-year-olds with bootcamp haircuts. Those fat car loans are only the beginning of a veteran’s exposure to exploitative financial services. The Department of Justice reports a multitude of schemes directed toward deceiving veterans. 

Members of America’s warrior class are easy targets for thieves because their personal data is widely shared and poorly protected. Federal Trade Commission reporting says active duty service members are three times more likely than civilians to see money disappear from their bank accounts. Congressional hearings have determined that service members lose hundreds of millions annually to scams and fraud. 

Veterans and military families who are exposed to these dangerous weapons of mass deception may end up in financial straits. At that point, predatory lenders swoop in to target them with loans bearing interest rates above 400 percent. Oh, and don’t worry about sending a check - automatic repayments will be drawn directly from your paychecks and applied to the interest rather than the principal. 

As a sergeant, one of my most squared-away Marines asked me for advice. His wife had been deceived by an online scammer and lost seven thousand dollars through an elaborate wire fraud and false employment scheme. I had no good advice for him to get justice, and I still don’t. This is an existential threat to military families, which is to say it threatens us all by weakening our national security. 

All U.S. veterans, whether they went to war or not, have given something of themselves to support our free and prosperous society. In turn, the taxpayers provide them modest benefits through the VA. So what do the scammers do? They impersonate the VA, calling veterans to “update records” when their actual intent is to steal their hard-earned benefits. 

We aren’t talking about once in a while; an AARP handbook warns that nearly half of all veterans have had money stolen through schemes like this.

We, the people, cannot trust that the federal government will somehow solve this problem. In response, communities are beginning to take up causes at the local level.

SI PPS, a non-profit public health organization on Staten Island, NY, is working to raise $50 thousand in a unique “Operation Debt-Day” campaign. That may sound modest, but thanks to their partnership with “End Veteran Debt”(EVD), $1 million in veteran debt will be abolished nationally. This will still leave $30,000 for EVD and their Veteran Task Force to use to operate locally to meet the immediate financial needs of veterans and those on active duty. 

This model of debt forgiveness, pioneered by Navy veteran and former debt collector Jerry Ashton, is a proven way forward. Ashton’s previous charity, Undue Medical Debt, which he co-founded 15 years ago, has abolished $45B (yes, Billion) in medical debt for over 10 million Americans. Through EVD, he intends to apply the same remedy, but this time to all forms of veteran debt, not just medical. EVD will host the first-ever “Veteran Debt Summit” in New Orleans, June 4, 5, and 6. It so happens I have a lot of friends in the New Orleans area, thanks to the connections I’ve made through Military Veterans in Journalism. Ashton himself is a member of MVJ and has long supported career opportunities in journalism for veterans. 

My friends from MVJ and I will be there to talk to these big players from the world of debt collections who are expected to attend. Other veteran organizations, NGOs, and CT thought leaders will also attend to unite around solutions to veteran debt. 

I believe his event could be the spark needed to restore financial solvency and dignity to the military community. It’s also just about the best way I can think of to mark the June 6 anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces launched the Normandy beach landings during World War II on their way to defeating Nazism. 

Honoring those heroes is part of the heart of Ashton’s EVD organization, which last year proclaimed the D-Day anniversary to be “Debt-Day” and vowed to eliminate $80 million worth of debt. Just as those American heroes liberated Europe, EVD and its partners hope to liberate today’s veterans from the toxic cycle of debt that endangers the social fabric of our country.