VA hopes new antifraud tools will help veterans identify, report common scams

The Department of Veterans Affairs is ramping up its antifraud efforts, with a VA official telling Nextgov/FCW that the recent rollout of new resources will help inform the department’s ongoing push to thwart scams targeting veterans. 

To provide veterans and their beneficiaries with the opportunity to identify and report common fraud schemes, VA announced on Aug. 9 that it launched a website and call center to centralize some of its scam prevention and reporting tools. Both platforms were launched as part of the Veteran Service Member and Family Fraud Evasion Task Force, which works to gather relevant resources from across the government. 

Fraud and veteran-focused scams have increased in recent years, especially since passage of the PACT Act in 2022. The law provided veterans exposed to burn pits and toxic substances with expanded access to benefits and health services, but it has also emboldened a new crop of predatory actors seeking to exploit retired service members' new services. A report released by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year found that veterans reported losing $350 million as a result of fraud in 2023.

John Boerstler, VA’s chief veterans experience officer and head of the department’s Veterans Experience Office, said internal efforts to analyze the agency’s fraud prevention tools over the past few years found that “it was kind of disjointed between different program offices, like, who was receiving this information, who was reporting it and how it was getting followed upon.”

Part of this review process, he said, included helping VA “better understand what type of behavior was impacting our veterans and, most importantly, which federal agencies we would need to partner with in order to enforce the law.” 

Boerstler said the call center and the new website, VSAFE.gov, helps veterans identify relevant agencies to whom they should report fraud, as well as steps they can take to protect themselves from being affected. Making the information more accessible, he added, was important “because it was so fragmented, it was so hard to navigate before putting it all in one location.”

To bolster these efforts further, VA is also standing up a new program office focused exclusively on scam and fraud prevention efforts. 

Boerstler said VA has detailed personnel to help launch the office, which will be its own entity within the Veterans Experience Office. The department plans to have the office permanently staffed in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025. These employees, he said, will help manage the new website, update the department’s fraud prevention toolkit and also manage the call center.

Both the VSAFE.gov platform and call center, Boerstler added, are already receiving feedback from veterans that will be useful for the department’s longer-term initiatives. 

“That data will help us determine not only how we resource the program office, but it'll continue to help us trend out what types of scam and fraud are coming at veterans and their families,” Boerstler said. 

VA’s launch of its new website and call center has already received bipartisan support from lawmakers who previously pressed the department to expand out its fraud prevention resources. 

Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in a letter to VA last month warning about the proliferation of PACT Act-related scams targeting veterans. He said the department’s recent efforts were a good start. 

“I’m glad that the VA, in conjunction with other federal agencies, is taking action to protect veterans and their families from scams,” Magaziner told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. “We now need to do everything we can to raise awareness of the VSAFE initiative and hold bad actors accountable for attempting to steal the benefits veterans have earned and deserve.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., also co-sponsored legislation last November to require VA to centralize its fraud prevention efforts by establishing a “Veterans Scam and Fraud Evasion Officer.”

“This is an important first step and I will continue to work to ensure my legislation passes to establish a Veterans Scam and Fraud Evasion Officer in the VA who can address the concerns of our veterans and their families in Upstate New York and across America,” Stefanik told Nextgov/FCW in a statement.