Not a scam: VA texting veterans to encourage them to apply for earned benefits

This story — a somewhat personal one — starts as many do nowadays, with an unsolicited text message from an unknown number.

If you’re anything like me, then you would probably react much as I did when the text from “468311” came in early one morning last week.

“Afghanistan Veteran: You’re likely eligible for VA monthly compensation. Visit VA.gov/PACT or call 1-800-698-2411 & press 8, then 2,” the message read, the number and website hyperlinked.

You couldn’t pay me to respond to that text message or click that link address and phone number, let alone trick me with a promise or “compensation.” I may have once been credulous enough to commit the most well known of the “classic blunders” by voluntarily involving myself in a land war in Asia, but I wasn’t going to be fooled by a phisher, a smisher, a spoofer, or whatever else these con artists are currently called.

Not today, scammers, I thought to myself, mentally adding the sort of expletives reasonably expected from a former sergeant of military police.

The number looked familiar, though. It looked an awful lot like the actual number for the Department of Veterans Affairs. As any modern-day journalist might, I turned to the Google for answers.

That number was the VA’s. The website, too. I’d certainly served in Afghanistan. I’ve written about the PACT Act — the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 — I knew that was real.

It’s a fairly well-researched con, then, I told myself.

Without clicking the certain-to-be scam text message, I called the Department of Veterans Affairs directly. If someone was trying to cheat veterans they would probably want to know.

“Is this a scam?” I asked.

“That is not a scam,” the actual human who answered the phone at the VA said. He couldn’t see my visible confusion.

Genuinely surprised — I may have even scoffed — I countered with something along the lines of “you’re telling me the VA is actually reaching out to veterans to encourage them to sign up for disability benefits?”

I’d been a VFW post officer. I’d heard the war stories, and not the ones about the battlefields, but against the government bureaucrat-boogeymen who seemed intent on standing in the way of earned post-service services. It couldn’t be true.

“Yes, we are,” the VA employee said.

I didn’t want to get that guy in trouble for talking to me — not for talking to a veteran, that’s literally his job, but to a journalist, which most government employees aren’t allowed. I reached out to his bosses.

According to the Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary at the Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, Adam Farina, the text message is part of a new “paradigm shift at VA” pushed by President Joe Biden and VA Secretary Denis McDonough.

“We have been given one mandate: inform veterans of the benefits available to them and get them in the door for services,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck outreach effort. The first in VA history, and certainly the largest in VA history, to get veterans to come to us.”

The text I’d received wasn’t the first the Department had sent. The veterans of Vietnam, whose exposure to Agent Orange is now presumed under the PACT Act, were contacted to apply for benefits in July. Those who served in Desert Storm were contacted after that. Afghanistan veterans are being contacted now, with Iraq War vets to follow.

So far, 3 million veterans have received such a text message, Farina said, with more to come.

“All of those efforts are targeted at veterans who are not currently receiving care or compensation at VA,” Farina said. “We want them to come to VA for the care and benefits they deserve.”

The VA has also hosted more than 800 live outreach events since March (including one at Gillette Stadium), and launched a national advertising campaign titled “What You Earned,” which aims to make veterans familiar with tangible VA benefits like low- or no-cost healthcare, no-money-down mortgages, and no-cost memorial and burial services.

The outreach is working, Farina said. More than 410,000 Veterans have enrolled for VA care over the last year, the largest enrollment jump since 2017. Since the PACT Act was signed into law in 2022, he said, nearly three-quarters of a million Veterans have enrolled in VA health care, a more than 33% increase compared to a similar period from before the legislation was signed.

The VA has received 4.4 million claims for compensation in the last two years alone, and 1.7 million of those fall under the PACT acts “presumed conditions” list, which makes it easier for veterans to tie their injuries to their service.

“The reason for this is we have found that veterans who come to VA do better,” Farina said. “We want them to come to VA, and that mandate has permeated through the Department, and we are just crushing the records.”

Right now, Farina said, more veterans are receiving disability benefits and care through the VA than ever before. This fiscal year alone, VA has awarded $137 billion in benefits to more than 6.7 million veterans.

Except for, of course, this procrastination-prone former noncommissioned officer, or I wouldn’t have gotten that text message.

I’ll have to get on top of that. If you got or get that text message, well, you probably should too. It really isn’t a scam (this time).