There are two jobs in the U.S. Army with well-earned reputations for causing concussions. One is being a “breacher,” blowing down locked doors and barricades. Another is firing the shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapon called the Carl Gustaf.

After he left the military, Dustin struggled as a civilian. He felt pretty certain he had a traumatic brain injury and PTSD, but it took years for him to apply for help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Applying for disability benefits can be an onerous process. Plus, Dustin said the ethos of his Ranger battalion instilled a resistance to admitting weakness, even after he got out.

 ”Culturally, you don’t go to sick call,” he said.

An older vet recommended Dustin get help from a private company to file for VA disability benefits. Dustin reached out to start the process, but after a month went by, he said, the company hadn’t done much of anything to help him. Dustin emailed the company and told them to stop working on his VA claim, he wanted to “cancel.” He said he then applied for benefits with help free of charge from an accredited representative of the VA.

But when the VA rated him 70 percent disabled, qualifying him for free health care and a monthly disability check, he then heard back from the company in the form of a bill for $4,500. Dustin had no idea how they even knew he’d gotten a decision from VA.

“I got this bill out of nowhere, when I got my VA rating, which just blew me away.”

The company Dustin hired: Trajector Medical.

Trajector is not alone. In recent years, scores of large and small outfits have sprung up promising to help vets apply for disability benefits. Critics call them “claim sharks.”

The firms operate in a legal gray area — barred by federal law from officially representing vets or charging them money to prepare their disability claim paperwork; they maintain they are merely helping vets from a distance to navigate the disability claim process. Trajector calls itself a “medical evidence service provider.”

“I think that they took advantage of me and… accessed the VA database to find out if I had a claim so they could make $4,500 from a guy who spent five and a half years in the Army and two tours in Afghanistan,” said Dustin, who refused to pay the bill. Trajector told him he couldn’t cancel the contract he’d signed.

Some vets do get help, but is it legal? 

In theory, veterans don’t need to pay for help with filing disability claims. They can get free support from accredited veterans service organizations, or VSOs, such as The American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Federal law mandates that anyone helping a vet file an initial disability claim must be accredited by VA and that the service be free of charge. Many do get effective help this way.

Trajector makes an appealing sales pitch. It tells veterans that if their claim is denied, they won’t owe a dime. But if they receive a disability rating from the VA, Trajector bills them a one-time amount equal to five times their monthly VA check. If a vet receives an increase in an existing rating, the company charges five times the increase in their monthly payment from VA.

Kelly, who didn’t want to use his last name for fear of his benefits being reduced by VA, is a 65-year old Navy veteran who tried, unsuccessfully, to apply for disability through an accredited VSO. He’d been working as a pedicab driver in Northern California, despite a spinal condition that made this work difficult and painful. Now, with a monthly check of $3,700 from the VA, he receives free healthcare and has been able to stop working.

Still, the law states that “no fee or compensation of any nature” can be charged for preparing and filing initial disability claims.

“We DO NOT do claims consulting” 

The federal government has had rules on the books to protect veterans’ benefits since the Civil War era, when opportunistic lawyers were bilking vets out of their pensions.

But while the law today says that anyone assisting vets with initial disability claims must be accredited and cannot charge money, companies like Trajector maintain those requirements don’t apply to them. The company says it stops short of actually preparing the necessary paperwork or directly filing disability claims for veterans.

“We don’t fill out your forms ourselves. We don’t file your claims. We don’t do any of that,” the company’s founder Jim Hill said in an interview posted on the company’s website in July. “You do it yourself, and we give you a medical evidence packet to attach when you file for claims.”

Erik Jensen, 67, served for 30 years before retiring from the Navy as a Lt. Commander in 2007. Early in his career, he was a deep-water diver stationed throughout the Pacific. He wore a bulky wetsuit with a copper helmet that together weighed more than 200 lbs, which Jensen said took a toll on his body.

Jensen hired Trajector in late 2023 to help him claim disability for psoriatic arthritis that was waking him in the night with painful and frozen joints. He completed a detailed questionnaire from the company about his medical history and service record. Trajector then sent Jensen an email with a link to review and submit his “medical evidence packet.”

“All of that was filled out,” he said.

Jensen also said he felt the paperwork exaggerated his arthritis symptoms and stated something that he felt was just wrong — that his sleep apnea was caused by service-related knee injuries. He said the two were “not even closely related” and that he hadn’t planned to file for sleep apnea in the first place.

Jensen then saw a confirmation screen that said, “Your application has been successfully faxed to VA.”

Trajector denies that the company files forms.

“The screenshot you provided is not from Trajector Medical, nor does it show or state that it is,” Zenofsky said. “We stand by our statements.”

A “separate” site 

The link Jensen clicked to review and submit his claim originated from a Trajector email and opened to a site called Benefit Karma. Zenofsky characterized Benefit Karma as “a separate and secure external software platform, which is freely and publicly available for use by all, which allows veterans to populate, review, edit and file their own forms.”

Documents show Benefit Karma has ties to Trajector. The trademark for Benefit Karma is held by Ampry Holdings, an LLC registered to Trajector founders Jim Hill and Gina Uribe. Benefit Karma and Ampry Holdings use the same Cheyenne, Wyo. business address that is listed in Trajector’s last annual report to the Florida Secretary of State as Jim Hill’s address.

A former employee of Trajector Inc., Trajector Medical’s parent company, said Benefit Karma was a new product Trajector Inc. launched in 2024. It was considered “another vertical of the business,” the employee said.

“I don’t think that’s a clever way to get around the law,” said Missal. “Trajector being involved, and whether it’s a company that they’re behind that actually pushes the button, they’re the one that’s really facilitating the filing.”

“It certainly violates the spirit and I would say it would violate the meaning of the law as well.”

“I’m embarrassed to say I ended up paying $12,000,” said Jensen.

CallBot – “That was the bloodhound.”

Navy veteran Vernell Armstrong hired Trajector last year to claim complications from an eye surgery she had while in service. But her claim was denied. Armstrong said she gave the company her decision letter and thought she was done dealing with them. She then undertook a separate process entirely on her own to appeal the decision with VA.

After receiving a favorable rating from the VA this year, and not speaking with a Trajector employee for months, she said, Armstrong was “more than surprised” to see a bill for $877.55 arrive in her inbox.

“It said, ‘Congratulations on your rate increase.’ And I said, ‘How the hell, pardon my French, how do y’all know? Because I haven’t talked to anybody and I haven’t told anybody anything.'”

When Trajector staff began calling and emailing her multiple times a week to pursue payment, Armstrong said she refused to pay.

“Why are y’all billing me for something that you didn’t do?” she asked. “I did all of this legwork on my own.”

The answer likely lies in what workers inside the company refer to as “CallBot.”

CallBot is a computerized auto-dialing system that persistently dials into the VA Benefits Hotline, a system meant for veterans to inquire about the amount of their monthly disability check. Trajector asks its clients to report any rating increase they receive to the company on an honor system. But the company also uses the hotline as a side door to track the status of the vets’ claims.

As Trajector’s client list grew, software developers built a program to automate the calls, according to a former tech worker. They named it CallBot.

CallBot could make as many as 20 concurrent calls to the VA and would run for days at a time on behalf of tens of thousands of veterans, former employees said.

“It’s a misuse of people’s trust and the system. The system is made for veterans, to ensure that they’re being updated,” said Miranda Cardenas.

“The problem is that with that system, it doesn’t tell you why they got an increase. It was all blind,” an invoicer said.

“There was no stopping point. Every increase that they got after that, we would just assume that it was by us. “

“They called me relentlessly.” – Telling vets 3x a day to pay up 

After Miranda Cardenas submitted his claim through Trajector, VA requested additional evidence from his medical providers to make a decision on his claim. He said Trajector refused to help him gather the additional records and he spent hours calling his providers and gathering documentation.

“They called me relentlessly,” said Dwayne, a Navy veteran who had a similar experience. He said Trajector pursued him for payment for three years and only recently stopped calling. He didn’t want to use his last name because he fears a renewed onslaught of collection emails and phone calls.

Dwayne said Trajector wasn’t responsible for his rating increase because his initial claim through the company was denied. He said he hired an attorney to appeal with VA. When the appeal was successful, Dwayne said, Trajector sent him a bill for $3,600.

“It used to be three times a day calling,” said Dwayne. “Just consistent barrages of calls.”

An invoicer said, “I would get emails back, ‘You guys did not help,’ like angry emails. ‘You guys did not help me get to this. I did this on my own.’ So essentially, sometimes we were billing people for increases that we didn’t even help them get.”

Another former staffer reported, “There was so much turnover because who wants to be yelled at by veterans all day?”

“ I didn’t know that I was gonna be like a debt collector, banging on people’s doors, ‘Gimme your money,'” she said.

One former invoicer said, “That’s when I started wondering, ‘Are we supposed to be doing this?'”

“They don’t want it in the press that third-party collection agencies are collecting on disabled veterans,” a former employee in Trajector’s collection department said.

Congress weighs action.

Two decades ago, Congress changed the federal law surrounding veterans disability claims. In 2006, the U.S. was at war in Iraq and there was a feeling vets needed more options to navigate an increasingly complex claims system. Against that backdrop, Congress voted to eliminate the criminal penalties for breaking the law against charging veterans for help with initial disability claims. It was a half-measure at best, and lawmakers never resolved this contradiction: the ban is on the books, but there are no penalties to enforce it.

Entrepreneurial veterans leapt into that legal gray area, realizing they could help fellow vets and make good money. The number of these claims consulting outfits has exploded over the last 10 years.

In the 2017 letter, VA Chief Counsel David J. Barrans quoted a litany of marketing materials from Trajector – then called Vet Comp & Pen Medical Consulting – that “strongly suggest that your organization is unlawfully assisting in the preparation, presentation and prosecution of claims before VA. By assisting in preparing claims, you and your organization are violating the laws governing accreditation.”

Barrans signed off with a warning to Hill: “By law, you, individually, and your organization, must immediately cease all preparation of and assistance in claims for VA benefits.”

“If I still ran the Office of Servicemembers Affairs, these complaints would be at the top of my priority list and would be taken very seriously,” Kantwill said.

VSOs, the VFW in particular, are pushing lawmakers to regulate the claims industry with the slogan “Don’t feed the sharks.” On the industry side, the field has grown large enough that claims companies formed a trade organization led by Peter O’Rourke, a former VA official in the first Trump administration.

Competing bills have percolated in Congress for several years and claims company executives have been called before lawmakers as recently as this year. One bill would reinstate criminal penalties. This bill, called the GUARD VA Benefits Act, is favored by several of the oldest VSOs, which offer claims assistance for free.

Some states have enacted a patchwork of laws to regulate how claims companies operate locally. Last year, Louisiana adopted a version of the CHOICE Act, while this summer Alabama passed a GUARD Act-like ban on claims companies.

“VA continues to examine this issue,” said Kasperowicz. “We also want to make sure Veterans have choices, particularly if they aren’t happy with whatever options might be available to them for free.”

The companies argue they allow vets to vote with their feet and pay for assistance if they need the extra help. Millions of Americans similarly pay for help filing their taxes, for example, though some of these companies can charge vets 10 or 20 times what they might pay for tax help. And there’s a wide range, with some companies charging vets $20,000 or more in some cases and others charging as little as $1,250.

“In no world should you be charging $10,000 for a VA claim. It doesn’t cost that,” said Lukas Simianer, the founder and CEO of VetClaims.AI, an Austin, Texas-based startup.

The 33-year-old founder said the GUARD Act goes too far in limiting veterans’ choice, but that he supports fee caps to shield vets from exploitation.

Congress may decide to impose such limits on claims companies. But until then, lower-cost startups like Simianer’s could put downward pressure on the fees being charged by more established firms like Trajector.

A mission to help vets, that workers say eroded over time. 

Like many of these firms, Trajector was started by people who’d been frustrated by the VA disability benefits system.

Hill, a Navy veteran and entrepreneur, co-founded the company in 2014 with Gina Uribe, a nurse and former VA medical examiner running a small claims consultancy from her home. After Uribe helped him with his own VA claim, Hill pitched her a vision to use technology and automation to multiply her impact. They started the company with a few staff working from Hill’s spare bedroom and Uribe’s dining room table in Gainesville, Fla.

There was plenty of demand from vets who wanted help. Trajector, originally called Vet Comp & Pen Medical Consulting, acquired smaller firms and by 2021 employed a global workforce of more than 1,300 employees across offices in Florida, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

“All of a sudden they’re getting this disability check that’s just gonna turn everything around for them… I’m like, wow, that’s real power.”

As Trajector grew though, former workers say things started to change.

“All of a sudden our calls became all about collection,” an early employee said. “They used to be about gathering other information and moving people through the claims process. And then it became about following up, ‘Did you win? Did you get a check? Can you help us out?'”

Trajector Inc., parent company to Trajector Medical, had plans to make a public offering, filing a draft registration with the SEC in August 2021. But in January 2022 they withdrew the paperwork.

“You can’t have this many customers that are upset,” said one former manager.