Marines fight faker with online campaign - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Marines fight faker with online campaign

When Skyler Whalen appeared on social networking sites last fall wearing a wrinkled Marine Corps uniform decorated with unearned medals, he unleashed the wrath of vigilant, faker-finding Marines.

Like wildfire, a painstakingly researched PowerPoint presentation detailing Whalen’s fantasies was e-mailed, posted, distributed and discussed on popular military forums and websites.

Before long, “Gunny Whalen’s” Facebook and MySpace pages both vanished.

The Marine Corps confirmed in an e-mail that there is no record of Whalen, a teen who appears to live in Kingman, Ariz., a railroad town of 25,000 near the California border.

Several calls to his family’s home in Kingman were not returned and e-mails went unanswered.

The 15-page PowerPoint presentation, whose author is unknown, was forwarded to Marine Corps Times and has been posted by P.O.W. Network, a watchdog group that keeps a database of military fakers.

In an online video, retrieved from his MySpace page, Whalen is seen awkwardly impersonating a drill instructor, barking commands at his dog and flailing a sword around.

In a screen grab of Whalen’s defunct Facebook page, he claims to be a gunnery sergeant with four combat deployments, a drill instructor and a recruiter. He also claims to have earned a Silver Star, a Combat Action Ribbon with three stars, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and others.

In photos, Whalen is seen wearing trousers that are too long, a wrinkled shirt and a belt that sags sloppily.

“WTF is going on with that belt? Did he get it at TJ Maxx?” quips one participant at AR15.com, an online forum populated by service members.

And that’s one of the tame comments.

“The guy is a total fraud,” said Sgt. Ferenc Silye, who saw the Facebook page before it disappeared and forwarded the PowerPoint report to Marine Corps Times’ Hall of Stolen Valor. “He had comments on there about how bad the war was, to make it sound like he was in Afghanistan. He looks way too young to be a gunny.”

Silye forwarded the report to the FBI in Phoenix, hoping to prompt an investigation under the Stolen Valor Act, he said. The FBI did not answer requests for comment.

“If he’s living out a fantasy, the military is not the way to do it. Too many guys have died. It’s about personal accountability,” said one Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

He said that he and other Marines regularly comb the Web for fakers. Hundreds of leathernecks, including officers, have taken an interest in the mission.

“If you [mess] up, we’ll hold you accountable,” he said.