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Walts, posers & wannabes (merged)

Michael O'Leary said:
... For information still held by DND and VAC, all the RCL needs to receive in return to a request is confirmation of medal entitlements once they establish the comms chain to do so.
Does DND have a form/response/mechanism @ their end to respond with a generic "yup, these match up" at their end?  I ask because although I understand the privacy of personal information, I don't know exactly what would be included.  If I was a Legion Service Officer, for example, would DND confirm to me, say, an individual's CD if they claim to have one?  I ask because I don't know.
 
As much as I believe the Legion should have a formal process for confirming service, the number of instances of the Legion being duped by posers is troubling.

For the folks on this website, posers can be spotted in about four seconds:  the uniform is wrong, the medals are wrong, things don't add up.  It is sometimes pretty obvious.

Is the Legion membership now so devoid of military personnel (with somewhat recent service) that they don't have the capability to spot the obvious fakes? 
 
milnews.ca said:
Does DND have a form/response/mechanism @ their end to respond with a generic "yup, these match up" at their end?  I ask because although I understand the privacy of personal information, I don't know exactly what would be included.  If I was a Legion Service Officer, for example, would DND confirm to me, say, an individual's CD if they claim to have one?  I ask because I don't know.

A currently established process? No. But that data can be seen by any clerk with the right access to the database that produces the MPRRs. In my mind the individual Service Offices should be contacting a single person in the RCL who talks to a single point of contact in DND for checks when someone's entitlement is in doubt. The first line of defence is the RCL should be asking for an official document from the applicant or member that establishes medal entitlement. They should know what an MPRR is and how to read it for medals entitlements, tours, etc. If the applicant can't show official documents, then the Branch should verify by other methods. Being expected and ready to prove your service and your entitlement to the medal you wear is no different than in the in the decades we used to issue a Discharge Certificate to soldiers for that purpose.
 
stoker dave said:
As much as I believe the Legion should have a formal process for confirming service, the number of instances of the Legion being duped by posers is troubling.

For the folks on this website, posers can be spotted in about four seconds:  the uniform is wrong, the medals are wrong, things don't add up.  It is sometimes pretty obvious.

Is the Legion membership now so devoid of military personnel (with somewhat recent service) that they don't have the capability to spot the obvious fakes?

Oh, for a moment there I thought that you were talking about some serving Officers :)
 
Michael O'Leary said:
A currently established process? No. But that data can be seen by any clerk with the right access to the database that produces the MPRRs. In my mind the individual Service Offices should be contacting a single person in the RCL who talks to a single point of contact in DND for checks when someone's entitlement is in doubt.
Seen.

Michael O'Leary said:
The first line of defence is the RCL should be asking for an official document from the applicant or member that establishes medal entitlement. They should know what an MPRR is and how to read it for medals entitlements, tours, etc. If the applicant can't show official documents, then the Branch should verify by other methods. Being expected and ready to prove your service and your entitlement to the medal you wear is no different than in the in the decades we used to issue a Discharge Certificate to soldiers for that purpose.
I'd be surprised if they didn't do that, but I also how how big organizations can work, with some branches/individuals being more ... diligent than others.
 
Does anyone here belong to ANAVETS? Wondering if they gave more diligence than the RCL?
 
stoker dave said:
As much as I believe the Legion should have a formal process for confirming service, the number of instances of the Legion being duped by posers is troubling.

For the folks on this website, posers can be spotted in about four seconds:  the uniform is wrong, the medals are wrong, things don't add up.  It is sometimes pretty obvious.

Is the Legion membership now so devoid of military personnel (with somewhat recent service) that they don't have the capability to spot the obvious fakes?

Speaking of the branch in my small town the answer is "YES." When I first arrived in town I visited the local Legion. A retired military type was nowhere to be seen... It is a social club. And yes I recognize and appreciate all of the valuable work they do for our community.



 
The Legion has little to do with military service these days, and very little experience of same....

http://espritdecorps.ca/perspectives-1/calling-out-the-great-veteran-pretender

It never fails to shock uninformed members of the public just how unmilitary and veteran-less the Legion has become. At one time, approximately 50 per cent of Canada’s more than 1 million Second World War veterans belonged to the Legion. Currently, there are nearly 700,000 serving and retired Canadian Armed Forces personnel. As of October 1, 2015, the Legion had 265,000 members. Of those, more than 200,000 never served in the military! This is contrary to the Legion’s specious claim on its website that its membership “includes approximately 100,000 Veterans.”

The truth is, online documents show military veterans are lumped into a category of 64,000 “Ordinary” members. However, this category also includes militaries of allied forces and all NATO nations as well as war correspondents, YMCA, Knights of Columbus, firefighters and forestry services who served in wartime. Coast guard, provincial and city police services also qualify. Of the estimated maximum 35,000 to 50,000 military veterans in the Legion, more than half are likely WWII veterans. That leaves approximately 17,500 to 25,000 who might be post-Korean War veterans or less than four per cent of all CAF veterans and only 10 per cent of Legion membership. The bottom-line: the Legion apparently doesn’t care enough about veterans to know how many veterans are Legion members.

No wonder that they are poor guardians of the faith.
 
Just read this news story, beats any poser story i have read here

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-fake-officer-didnt-spy-at-nato-or-hurt-security-2020-1

Man fakes a career as an Officer in the Sweden Army, for 18 years.
 
So he served for 18 years in the Swedish military with out joining. that’s not walting it’s volunteering.
 
I'd love to see a resume of is service over the last 18 years. Sounds like he's actually shown up, done work, presumably gone on courses and such... Sounds like an extremely irregular enrolment, in other words.
 
my72jeep said:
So he served for 18 years in the Swedish military with out joining. that’s not walting it’s volunteering.

Maybe not quite "volunteering".  My take on the linked story is that the individual was "employed" by the Swedish Armed Forces (as stated in the article - The military chief told TT that "at least once, an employment decision has been made on unclear grounds").  Again my take, this individual was employed as an officer despite not having a university degree (like Canada, probably one of the requirements for commissioning in Sweden) and also despite not having done their officer training program.

. . . the man used forged certificates falsely showing that he had passed the Swedish Army Forces' officer training program and also falsely claiming to have a university degree in politics.

From having a quick look at the Swedish recruiting/hiring pages (and from four decades ago contact with Swedish soldiers on UN ops) their military career patterns are much more fluid than what we expect back here.  While we would expect that most hard positions would be filled by "regulars", they fill many positions (entry, mid, and high-level) with applicants on contracts similar to what we recognize as "Class C" with a difference - that difference being that the person may not have been in an organized military unit since their basic military obligatory service.

It is entirely possible that he was originally hired for an officer level position based on his unverified claim that he already did officer training and his applications for later jobs also were not checked for accuracy or truthfulness.
 
Brihard said:
I'd love to see a resume of is service over the last 18 years. Sounds like he's actually shown up, done work, presumably gone on courses and such... Sounds like an extremely irregular enrolment, in other words.

The article is a little short on details such as how was the man able to access funds to travel on duty (i.e. a TD claim/advance), or did he get paid?  Did he somehow get himself entered into their HRMS? How was he able to DAG GREEN for deployment to Mali without being detected?

Something doesn't smell right.
 
Brihard said:
I'd love to see a resume of is service over the last 18 years. Sounds like he's actually shown up, done work, presumably gone on courses and such... Sounds like an extremely irregular enrolment, in other words.

Pretty funny when you think about it how he can walk off the street with no previous courses, training or experience and do the job well enough for almost two decades to not get caught. Wonder if some good idea fairies are looking at this now as a proposal to fill our HQs and 'reduce the training time by eliminating DP1'.

I vote to fill the seats with inanimate carbon rods and set up their emails to auto-forward to the person that needs the info. You can add in a random deletion/no reply to give it the 'human touch'.
 
Navy_Pete said:
I vote to fill the seats with inanimate carbon rods and set up their emails to auto-forward to the person that needs the info. You can add in a random deletion/no reply to give it the 'human touch'.

Hmmm.  Sounds like some of the places I have worked...
 
PPCLI Guy said:
Hmmm.  Sounds like some of the places I have worked...

Or some of the workplaces foreseen by these guys:

Future of Work

Disruption lies ahead

Driven by accelerating connectivity, new talent models, and cognitive tools, work is changing. As robotics, AI, the gig economy and crowds grow, jobs are being reinvented, creating the “augmented workforce.” We must reconsider how jobs are designed and work to adapt and learn for future growth.

https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/human-capital/topics/future-of-work.html
 
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