In the year In early August 2022, readers emailed us about a report that Jacob Rivas, an elderly American veteran, had started selling his medals to buy groceries. The headline read, “An old veteran sells his medals and sells them and the next day he sees a military band playing in his backyard.” While this article may seem legitimate to some readers, the truth is that the story was published as an inspirational novel.

On July 30, the article was published on the Turkish-language website news5media.com, with the author’s credit to “Administrator”. We also found the story on amodays.com and thedailymagazines.com. No credible news sources, local, national, or international, have published anything about US veteran Rivas selling his military medals and merchandise.

The novel is published as:

A 93-year-old man ran out of money to buy groceries and sold his precious medals. The next day he wakes up to see a senior military team playing outside his house.

Some of the hardest sacrifices require the strongest will. Sometimes, you are forced to make those difficult choices to bring sunshine into someone’s life. But what 93-year-old war veteran Jacob Rivas did was a bit extreme and proved that sacrifice is always in a soldier’s blood.

According to the story, Rivas visited a local supermarket and “He was shocked to see that the price of the items had gone up. So he visited an antique store owned by an old man named Billy Simpson; There he sold his medals, including the Medal of Honor, for just $250.

The story ends with Simpson showing up the next morning to Rivas’ house with a military band to celebrate his years of service. Simpson returned the award to the veteran, telling him it reminded him of his late grandfather.

Amodays.com, one of the websites that published the story, added the following disclaimer at the bottom of the article.

This article is inspired by stories found in the daily lives of our readers and written by a professional writer. Any resemblance to actual names or places is purely coincidental. All images are for illustrative purposes only.

All in all, the story of Rivas, the American veteran who sold his war medal to buy groceries, was nothing more than sensational fiction. Such stories are referred to as abuse.