Okay. I am a veteran with service connected disabilities and last year somebody hacked my ebenefits account and changed the bank account that my disability checks get deposited into. So I didn’t realize that my check never came in and when I talked to the VA about it, the time it takes to go through the process of getting my money is ridiculously long. I got evicted from my house because I couldn’t pay rent, you know because someone was stealing all my money. Eventually it all gets rectified, I got my money back, and the VA froze my ebenefits account so nobody can access it anymore not even me. Everything that needs to be done with the VA now has to be done over the phone, by mail, or by going into a VA office.

This year, I started going back to school and using my Gi bill. I am going to a school in a fairly expensive area of California, and so the Gi bill pays a pretty high amount for rent. Except this semester started in January, and I still haven’t gotten paid. When I moved out here for school it was with the expectation that I’d be making more than double what I am currently living on, and so it’s been a struggle getting by while I wait for the VA to get their shit together. I would have been paid last month, but apparently they sent my Gi bill checks to the same goddamn account of the guys that stole my money last year. Apparently they forgot to change the bank info of my Gi bill checks, they only fixed the account for the disability checks. So they sent over 10 thousand dollars of my back pay back to those crooks. They also sent my may check to those guys, even though they figured out that account was fraudulent on like the 20th of April. I had to take out a loan with a ridiculously high interest rate (around 130%) in order to survive these last few months, which I was supposed to pay back the following month when I got the checks from the Gi bill. So now assuming I do get my money this month, I can pay off the loan but I will have paid over 1k in interest. For mistakes the VA made. They also will not tell me any information about the fraudulent account, nor will they send that information to the police. They will only put it in a case file and send it to the inspector general. Which I was told the case backlog is so long that they won’t even look at the case for about 18 months, and that was before the government shutdown. So these fucking dirtbags who stole a veterans disability checks will be long gone by then, completely getting away with it. I get no justice. The VA won’t offer any assistance even for some of the problems that they directly caused, nothing to hold me over even when I was almost homeless and could only afford a shitty Airbnb spot in someone’s backyard. Nothing to compensate me for my credit being fucked up or the thousand dollars I will have paid for their mistake. The semester is over in 2 weeks, it’s very likely that I will end up having gone the ENTIRE semester without getting paid. Some of these people are just unbelievably incompetent. Every time I call the VA to find out where my money is, they tell me something completely different. But really the thing I’m most mad about is whoever stole my money is going to get away with it. And the VA has the information that the police could use to find and prosecute the criminal/s that stole my money, they just won’t give it to me or the police. Knowing that the single office that deals with these fraud cases won’t even know about this for 18+ months. It’s pretty alarming to me that basically anybody can just freely steal money from disabled veterans and totally get away with it.