Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| Michael Becker / Fox Matt Farmer and daughter, Cadence 
 
 American Idol season 12 contestant Matthew Farmer has admitted that his story of suffering from a traumatic war injury was a fabrication. 
 
 Farmer, a handsome 26-year-old singer, seemed like a lock for the Idol crown. He had a strong audition, scoring points by bringing in his cute daughter, Cadence, and telling a compelling story of military service and receiving a life-threatening injury in Kuwait. 
 
 For extra heartstrings, he claimed to host Ryan Seacrest that the medicine he was taking to heal the brain injury made him sterile, thus his daughter's birth was a miracle. He went even further, telling judges Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, and Keith Urban that he was dedicating his audition to his friends in service. 
 
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 Fox News reports he now says that he will no longer compete on the show after it was discovered he completely made up the story about sustaining a brain injury in an IED explosion in Iraq. 
 
 "It was ALL lies," Farmer wrote in a statement to Guradianofvalor.com "I in fact HAVE lied since a younger age and had a problem with it. I am coming out and making a statement (even though I was instructed not to) because I DO want to come clean." 
 
 Farmer first denied making the claim at all, stating that Idol producers created the tall-tale through creative editing in his video package. He also said that the photos of himself in the military were stock photos that he did not provide. 
 
 "I'm FIRM in the fact that I know I had talked about it over 6 hours of interviews that I discussed certain missions and stuff that we did on a day to day basis," he stated on the website. "Then I mentioned to a producer in an interview that I had an accident while in country and remember 'waking up in Kuwait.' This is where this was all pieced together. I am sure you have watched the clip and can realize that it is chopped up." 
 
 However, fellow soldiers that served with Farmer took to another website, StolenValor.com, to call him out on his facts. The "brain injury" in question was not from combat, they said, but from an overdose of acne medication and alcohol, which is forbidden in the military. 
 
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 “I was a sniper section leader attached to his company and lived in the same room with him until he was medevaced from Ramadi because he got drunk while he was taking Accutane,” wrote a soldier who claimed to be his roommate. “He was never involved in one single direct fire engagement, was never wounded, and made up this whole lie to try and make his story sound good to American Idol." 
 
 Although Farmer is denying claims that he was kicked out of the army and Iraq, he said he is now going to tell the truth from now on. 
 
 "I was told to keep quiet and not talk to anyone, and I have decided that what’s best for me and my family is to come out and end the insanity," Farmer wrote. "I indeed have many many things to work with and need to get a lot of help doing it. Again I apologize to everyone that I have come across and hurt or lied too." 
 
 Watch Farmer's entire audition below: 
 
 Twitter: idol_worship 
 
 Michele Amabile ||||| Anderson keeps his dark hair trimmed short on the sides, and on the day I visited him, he wore blue jeans and a black T‑shirt emblazoned with u.s. veteran. He comes across as steady and unexcitable, his thick eyebrows framing a calm gaze. Doug Sterner, who served as a combat engineer in Vietnam and mentored Anderson in imposter investigation, describes him as circumspect. “He has a levelheaded approach,” Sterner told me. “It’s not a game, you’re not a cop, and it’s not about bagging a phony. It’s about getting to the bottom of the facts.” 
 
 Sterner first discovered military fakers by accident, after launching a website devoted to cataloging the recipients of the nation’s top valor awards (the Pentagon only recently began compiling a master list). So far, he says he has compiled names and battle narratives for some 270,000 award recipients—though, as he has discovered, plenty of people claim to have received awards who never did. Sorry, Sterner learned to say when someone complained that a family member was missing from his list. Dad’s not a war hero. He finds these cases depressing, a distraction from his work “preserving the lives of real heroes,” so when Anderson reached out with a question about military records several years ago, Sterner welcomed his interest in investigating fakers; today, Sterner frequently sends stolen-valor tips Anderson’s way. 
 
 If a lead seems legit, like the one about the Special Operations soldier turned police trainer, Anderson will poke around online to learn more about the person and hopefully find a date of birth or, better yet, a Social Security number. With those, he can access military personnel records, which will show, at the very least, where and when a person served. Freedom of Information Act requests can yield more-detailed documents, like those included with discharge papers, which show war-zone duty and special awards and recognitions. Many records are stored at the National Personnel Records Center, in St. Louis, but not all. Some military branches now keep their own records, so the search process can take months. “I build the case just like I’m taking it to trial,” Anderson says. “If a jury wouldn’t look at it and decide that person’s guilty, I won’t post it.” 
 
 For as long as soldiers have gone off to war, they’ve exaggerated and lied about it, in ways big and small. When George Washington established the U.S. military’s first badges of honor, in 1782, he understood that soldiers deserved recognition, but also that they couldn’t be trusted not to embellish their exploits: “Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them they shall be severely punished,” he wrote. 
 
 So it continues today. In this thank-you-for-your-service era of adulation for the military, some can’t resist the ego-stroking pull of handshakes and discounts. Others get a thrill out of putting one over on everyone else. Anderson likes to tell the story of William James Clark, whose case preceded his own investigations. In 2002, after a barge slammed into a bridge spanning the Arkansas River, killing 14 people, Clark showed up wearing an Army uniform, told authorities that he was a Special Forces captain just back from overseas, and for two days asserted that he was in charge of rescue and recovery efforts—despite the fact that he was a civilian and had never served a day. “He took over,” Anderson said, giggling and shaking his head, “because he was in uniform and they allowed him to.”
– Armed with plenty of caffeine and a laptop, Anthony Anderson works from his South Carolina home to expose a unique type of deception: stolen valor, where people pretend to be service members, or actual service members and veterans who exaggerate or lie about their war stories. A piece in the Atlantic details how Anderson works to uncover fraudulent military claims, using both his Facebook page and website—the latter of which was instrumental in 2013 in exposing an American Idol contestant who claimed he had suffered a brain injury after an IED explosion while serving in Iraq—to get the word out on the scammers. Anderson started his amateur investigative service about five years ago and gets some of his leads from Doug Sterner, an ex-combat engineer in Vietnam who first came across some of his own fakers while setting up a database of real military heroes. When he gets a tip, Anderson—himself a staff sergeant with South Carolina's National Guard—first heads to his computer for some online scouring, where he hopes to match a name with a DOB or Social Security number. With that info, it's easier for him to track down the basics (e.g., where a person served and when). If he needs more details, he can file a FOIA request. Anderson says he just wants the truth in his searches, and he takes false accusations seriously, making sure to try to contact alleged fraudsters to get their side. As for whether he feels more "distaste" for civilians playing military or service members hyping up their contributions, Anderson notes: "If you served, you should know better than a civilian what it means. … For somebody else to claim it when they haven't earned it, it just makes you angry." (Prosecutors say a veteran faked war wounds to get a Purple Heart and $750K in benefits.)