Anderson keeps his dark hair trimmed short on the sides, and on the day I visited him, he wore blue jeans and a black T‑shirt emblazoned with u.s. veteran. He comes across as steady and unexcitable, his thick eyebrows framing a calm gaze. Doug Sterner, who served as a combat engineer in Vietnam and mentored Anderson in imposter investigation, describes him as circumspect. “He has a levelheaded approach,” Sterner told me. “It’s not a game, you’re not a cop, and it’s not about bagging a phony. It’s about getting to the bottom of the facts.”

Sterner first discovered military fakers by accident, after launching a website devoted to cataloging the recipients of the nation’s top valor awards (the Pentagon only recently began compiling a master list). So far, he says he has compiled names and battle narratives for some 270,000 award recipients—though, as he has discovered, plenty of people claim to have received awards who never did. Sorry, Sterner learned to say when someone complained that a family member was missing from his list. Dad’s not a war hero. He finds these cases depressing, a distraction from his work “preserving the lives of real heroes,” so when Anderson reached out with a question about military records several years ago, Sterner welcomed his interest in investigating fakers; today, Sterner frequently sends stolen-valor tips Anderson’s way.

If a lead seems legit, like the one about the Special Operations soldier turned police trainer, Anderson will poke around online to learn more about the person and hopefully find a date of birth or, better yet, a Social Security number. With those, he can access military personnel records, which will show, at the very least, where and when a person served. Freedom of Information Act requests can yield more-detailed documents, like those included with discharge papers, which show war-zone duty and special awards and recognitions. Many records are stored at the National Personnel Records Center, in St. Louis, but not all. Some military branches now keep their own records, so the search process can take months. “I build the case just like I’m taking it to trial,” Anderson says. “If a jury wouldn’t look at it and decide that person’s guilty, I won’t post it.”

For as long as soldiers have gone off to war, they’ve exaggerated and lied about it, in ways big and small. When George Washington established the U.S. military’s first badges of honor, in 1782, he understood that soldiers deserved recognition, but also that they couldn’t be trusted not to embellish their exploits: “Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them they shall be severely punished,” he wrote.

So it continues today. In this thank-you-for-your-service era of adulation for the military, some can’t resist the ego-stroking pull of handshakes and discounts. Others get a thrill out of putting one over on everyone else. Anderson likes to tell the story of William James Clark, whose case preceded his own investigations. In 2002, after a barge slammed into a bridge spanning the Arkansas River, killing 14 people, Clark showed up wearing an Army uniform, told authorities that he was a Special Forces captain just back from overseas, and for two days asserted that he was in charge of rescue and recovery efforts—despite the fact that he was a civilian and had never served a day. “He took over,” Anderson said, giggling and shaking his head, “because he was in uniform and they allowed him to.”