In October 2014, we published the preliminary results of an annuitant harassment investigation, and the findings were ugly: phone calls that ignored every do-not-call request, “Gotcha!” checks in the mail, salesmen impersonating our own firm, and representatives turning up at front doors and hunting annuitants down on Facebook. We argued then that nearly all of it traced to one root cause — court-record scraping — and that the remedy was to protect annuitants’ personal identifying information. For years, that argument mostly echoed in an empty room.

This past May, John Oliver gave the segment we’d been waiting a decade for someone to make. It went viral, jingle and all. He walked viewers through a cognitively impaired seller allegedly coached through a remote hearing, and a Minnesota man who sold $2.3 million in future payments for $700,000 — about thirty-five cents on the dollar. Millions of people watched a comedian describe, in 2026, almost exactly what our clients described to an independent investigator in 2014. The tactics hadn’t evolved much. They’d simply, finally, made it onto television.

We take no satisfaction in having been right, because being right meant another decade of annuitants got harassed while the industry looked away. And we’d gently push one step past Oliver, on the same point we’ve made from the start: the abuses are real, but factoring itself is not the villain. A structured settlement is a fine thing until life happens to it — a medical emergency, an eviction, a disaster no plan survives — and the problem was never that the option exists. It’s how vulnerable people get found and pressured into using it when they shouldn’t. So here we are, years on, watching our own argument go viral but out of a comedian’s mouth on HBO. We’ll say what we said in 2014, because nothing has made it untrue: protect the records, and most of what Oliver exposed simply can’t happen.



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