On Monday, a woman from Rhode Island was charged with fraudulently claiming to be a wounded U.S. Marine Corps veteran and using that to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in veterans benefits and other charitable contributions.
31-year-old Sarah Jane Cavanaugh was arrested and appeared in federal court in Providence on Monday, U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha announced. She faces four different charges, including using forged or counterfeited military discharge certificates, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
She was released on a $50,000 bond.
The Warwick, RI native lied about being the recipient of a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, prosecutors said, so she was charged specifically with fraudulently holding herself out to be a medal recipient with intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit.
Investigators said Cavanaugh also lied about having cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, where she said she served, and inhaling the aftermath of an IED explosion.
Police said Cavanaugh user her job at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence and her access to real Marines personal records to falsely claim she had served in the Marines from 2009-2016. She said she reached the rank of Corporal, and was honorably discharged after being wounded in action, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office - District of Rhode Island.
She also used an official Veterans Administration email account to purchase and display her fake Purple Heart and Bronze Star on a Marine uniform.
In her grand scheme, police said Cavanaugh pretended to be a wounded combat veteran and collected $207,000 from the Wounded Warrior organization. The money was intended to pay for physical therapy and groceries.
But that wasn't the only organization that she used the fake identity to steal money from, police said. She was able to collect $18,472 from "Code of Support" to help with mortgage payments, repairs to her home furnace, a gym membership, and other unspecified bills.
The list goes on: By using her fake Purple Heart and Bronze Star, Cavanaugh was able to collect about $16,000 from CreatiVets, a charity that provides veterans with therapy through art programs, police said, and she used her fake cancer diagnosis to collect another $4,700 from a fundraising website.
Cavanaugh was caught when the nonprofit HunterSeven Foundation notified the FBI about their suspicion of her scheme. The organization is founded by veterans and specializes in medical research focused on post-9/11 veterans.
"It never crossed my mind that somebody would do this," HunterSeven Foundation Executive Director Chelsey Simoni told WBZ-TV on Tuesday.
Simoni went on to explain how Cavanaugh's master plan was executed very well. Her stories added up, she said, and everything sounded legit. It wasn't until the nonprofit posted about her story on social media that other veterans began to question the legitimacy of her Purple Heart and Bronze Star.
"She had all the right stories, knew all the right words, all the right terms," Simoni told WBZ. "When I asked her to explain to me what happened, she said to me I was in Afghanistan, I was the second vehicle in a convoy and we hit an IED that was buried on the side of the road. She said her lung cancer was a direct correlation from the particulate matter related to the IED blast, which is an extremely concerning, that’s something that happens fairly often that gets overlooked."
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