How Ethos Sold Wall Street on AI While Powering an Analog Boiler Room

Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is short $LIFE and short bonds issued by Sammons Financial Group. Positions may change at any time. This article is not investment advice or any recommendation. See full disclosures below.

• Ethos' third-party agencies, dominated by multilevel marketing organizations, make up about 40% of the company’s revenue. Ethos isn’t a carrier. It sells other companies’ policies for a commission, directly to consumers online and through third-party agencies. The agency channel grew about twice as fast as the direct business in 2024 and 2025.
• More than two-thirds of all Ethos agents and about 83% of its agency revenue is concentrated in just three agencies that Hunterbrook’s reporting indicates are multilevel marketers. Ethos doesn’t say who those agencies are, so Hunterbrook estimated using the personalized “microsites” Ethos gives every onboarded agent. Nearly 70% of these sites belong to three agencies, based on Hunterbrook Media’s investigation, and five of the top six run on multilevel compensation structures. The largest, Family First Life (FFL), accounts for an estimated 42% of all agents on the platform.
• The agencies recruit with income claims regulators have already called deceptive. MLM agencies rely on new recruits as a key source of revenue, and promise great wealth to attract new recruits. In reality, studies show up to 99% of MLM participants lose money. In December 2021, the FTC sent FFL a cease-and-desist letter for “unlawfully misrepresenting” that recruits were “likely to earn substantial income.”
• Ethos sells its abandoned applications as leads, and the leads fuel the recruitment machine. When someone starts an application on Ethos' website and doesn’t finish, Ethos sells the information to FFL and potentially other partner agencies. FFL agents are pressured and possibly even required to purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of leads, a cost they theoretically recoup by selling insurance. Pay-to-play, which the FTC has warned could indicate a pyramid scheme, is one of the most controversial aspects of MLMs.
• Ethos’ customers may not know their information is being sold to third parties for profit. When applying for insurance on Ethos’ platform, the only chance Hunterbrook reporters got to opt out of data sharing was a single line buried in the privacy policy that users “agree to” by clicking “continue” to launch the online application. Consumers complain on the Better Business Bureau website and social media sites about calls from multiple "Ethos agents," calls after 9 p.m., and calls after asking to be removed. At least eight federal robocall lawsuits have named Ethos since 2020, some arguing Ethos is liable for the callers because Ethos benefits from the activities.
• Some of Ethos’ MLM agents appear to engage in improper sales and marketing practices, including steering customers toward more expensive products they don’t need. Ethos built an “exclusive” “exclusive” indexed universal life (IUL) product "specifically" for FFL agents, and IULs were a significant driver of revenue growth in Ethos’ agency channel last year. Consumer advocates warn IULs are complex products often missold because they’re lucrative. Ethos gives additional bonuses for selling IULs, and FFL's blog pitches IULs for their "larger average commissions."
• Some agents also appear to be replacing policies for more commission, sometimes without customer consent. Agents are told to "review" clients' policies every six to 12 months in order to replace them, according to a former FFL agent who spoke with Hunterbrook. This practice, known as “churning,” is often prohibited under state laws like Florida's. Customers eat the cost, while agents earn a fresh commission.‍
• Agents also sometimes appear to suggest an affiliation with government programs or agencies. Training materials obtained by Hunterbrook instruct agents to handle objections by mentioning they represent a state-regulated program. In a recording of an alleged FFL agent, the man admits to using a sham website to mislead veterans. These practices could violate the FTC’s Impersonation Rule, The Telemarketing Sales Rule, and NAIC model regulations. ‍
• Some agents even appear to have had their licenses revoked or denied. A 2024 FFL post celebrating the week's top "Ethos superstars" included two agents who had previously been fined for selling insurance without a license or had their license revoked. Hunterbrook found dozens of agents with Ethos microsites whose licenses were revoked or suspended for, among other reasons, submitting fictitious applications, misappropriating client money, or misrepresenting insurance policies. One, a lawyer, was disbarred for misappropriating client funds. Others have had licenses revoked for child neglect, fraud, and making misrepresentations to potential clients. ‍
• Ethos’s business model carries concentration risk. Hunterbrook reported on September 15 that at a recent FFL conference, FFL President Shawn Meaike ranked Ethos the "weakest" of FFL’s partners onstage. Meaike made Ethos’ reps apologize for their handling of a weekslong system outage at TruStage, one of Ethos' three main carriers. Meaike then said Instabrain, which offers a similar agent platform to Ethos, was brought on specifically because it can do everything Ethos can do. ‍
• Agency growth is eroding margins. Contribution margins fell from 42% in 2025 to 33% in the second quarter of 2026, which management blamed on channel and product mix. The Bear Cave, now a Hunterbrook publication, reported in May that Ethos is little more than a "lead-gen business;" J.P. Morgan rebutted that claim by pointing out that Ethos’ margin was well above pure lead generators. ‍
• Venture backers and insiders have sold shares. Google Ventures, now GV, has sold close to 46% of its stake. Chief Executive Peter Colis, President Lingke Wang, Chief Financial Officer Christopher Capozzi, and Chief Accounting Officer Brandt Kucharski sold roughly $19 million of stock combined in August and September. Those transactions included sales under previously adopted trading plans and mandatory sales to cover tax withholding.
• Ethos, FFL, GFI, Equis, and Experior did not provide any comment as of the time of this publication.

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To Wall Street, Ethos Technologies ($LIFE) is a rare success story in “insurtech” — industry shorthand for startups trying to replace traditional insurance brokers with code. Ethos’ pitch is simple: Bypass the pushy salesmen and inconvenient doctor visits with a “100% online” app that uses algorithms to approve life insurance in minutes.

Backed by GV, formerly Google Ventures, and SoftBank, Ethos has sold investors on rapid, profitable growth that eluded earlier insurtech peers that collapsed or were sold off for scrap, its CEO Peter Colis told TechCrunch. Ethos’ stock closed September 30 at $33.57 about 77% above its $19 IPO price, after trading at more than double that price early last month.

J.P. Morgan, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank — investment banks that helped underwrite its IPO and now cover the company — essentially tell the same bullish story: Ethos is a technology-driven insurance broker with high margins, high customer-satisfaction scores, and a large underinsured market to expand into. In May, Deutsche Bank called it "essentially the only digitally-native scaled life insurance provider left in the market."

In May, The Bear Cave, now a Hunterbrook Media publication, described Ethos as a mediocre “lead-generation business" with “a narrow moat,” facing “allegations of misconduct from consumer complaints filed with regulators." J.P. Morgan largely defended Ethos, citing the company’s margins well above lead-gen businesses.

But the reality on the ground may be grittier. A months-long Hunterbrook investigation shows that a major portion of Ethos' revenue is fueled by a sprawling army of mostly commission-only multilevel marketing recruits churning out sales via aggressive cold calls and predatory and sometimes deceptive sales tactics.

MLMs aren’t illegal per se. But they’re controversial because of a recruitment-driven structure that the Federal Trade Commission has warned can cross into an unlawful "pyramid scheme." That could happen when participants' income comes mainly from recruiting new distributors rather than from selling products to real customers. Hunterbrook found numerous signs of recruitment-driven compensation at Ethos partner agencies.

One obvious sign: the constant churn of social media posts peddling promises of wealth. In reality, wealth in MLM organizations is often concentrated at the top, with some estimates showing as much as 99% of all participants losing money. Several of Ethos’ partner MLM agencies have faced lawsuits and enforcement actions for misrepresenting earnings potential to new recruits.

Ethos tells investors that its third-party agencies and agents are primarily independent contractors beyond its operational control. But Ethos' role in the MLM machine may not be so passive.

Ethos provides Family First Life, a life insurance MLM and by far the largest of Ethos’ partner agencies by head count, according to Hunterbrook’s analysis, with bespoke products, hosts training sessions, and supplies the lifeblood of the recruitment machine: leads. The leads are compiled from the personal data of consumers who started an Ethos application and walked away.

MLM recruitment ads and training materials obtained by Hunterbrook repeatedly emphasize the importance of purchasing these leads, which is an indication of how important they are as a revenue source for Ethos’ key partner MLM agencies. Agents are pressured to “invest” what could amount to thousands of dollars a month in leads, according to a former agent who spoke with Hunterbrook.

Leads also enable the MLM business model, which has been accused of inflicting spam calls, privacy infringement, and predatory sales tactics on customers.

At a recent FFL training conference held in Fort Lauderdale on September 10, MLM agents said they make hundreds of calls for up to 12 hours a day. Customers could get called “50 times” from different agents based on the same lead, according to a former FFL agent. Hunterbrook found at least 10 do-not-call lawsuits against FFL and its parent company, Integrity Marketing Group, as well as eight separate suits naming Ethos as a defendant since 2020.

Agents appear to routinely cross lines, steering customers to more expensive products, misleading them about the agents' affiliation, and writing policies without customer consent, according to multiple interviews with customers and MLM agents, accounts posted by former agents and customers on YouTube and social media, federal court complaints, and state regulatory actions against agents who sell Ethos policies.

Ironically, these tactics don’t always help Ethos’ bottom line. A phone script specifically for calling Ethos leads posted on an FFL branch website instructs agents to call Ethos a “secondary carrier” and promise customers a better rate with a “preferred carrier.”

Some agents have a checkered record that regulators have already deemed disqualifying. Hunterbrook found dozens of agents listed on Ethos’s platform whose licenses had previously been revoked or placed on probation.

Regulatory risk isn’t the only potential problem Hunterbrook found with the business model. Ethos relies on just three agencies to provide the brokers making most of the calls, which suggests concentration risk.

In its 2025 10-K, Ethos said 31% of total revenue came from “three of our most significant agency relationships,” up from 17% in 2023 and 25% in 2024. That means roughly 83% of the channel came from three distributors in 2025. That’s also broadly consistent with Hunterbrook’s estimate based on counting the personalized “microsites” Ethos gives every onboarded agent, which put the top three agencies at about 70% of the total agents onboarded with Ethos.

The danger in relying on too few agencies was on full display at a recent FFL sales conference, in a particularly embarrassing way for Ethos. On September 15, Hunterbrook reported an open rebuke by FFL President Meaike, who ranked Ethos as his agency’s “weakest” partner and demanded Ethos reps apologize onstage. The awkward moment came after an outage at one of Ethos’ main carriers, TruStage, caused policy lapses and other service disruptions, according to Ethos strategic accounts manager Dylan Cummings.

"We saw a 15% increase in lapses than we normally would" during the roughly three weeks of outage in July, Cummings told a Hunterbrook reporter on the sidelines of the conference. The day after Hunterbrook's report, Ethos filed an 8-K addressing the TruStage outage for the first time, though it claimed no change to the lapse rates "in the July billing cycle."

Later onstage, Meaike welcomed another technology partner, Instabrain, telling the audience that he brought the company on because it has all the capabilities Ethos has.

Ethos' Sprawling Network of MLMs

Ethos isn’t itself an insurance carrier. It’s a middleman that sells insurance policies for other carriers, then earns a commission on those sales. It does so mainly in two ways: directly to consumers on its online platform, and through a network of third-party distributors that sell on Ethos' behalf.

In 2019, Ethos Senior Vice President of Risk & Actuarial Brett Wilson framed the company’s focus on its direct-to-consumer platform as an ethical choice: “In the commissioned sales model, overselling is in the agent’s interest,” he told an interviewer. He added, ”We have no interest in selling someone a policy they might not be able to afford.”

But the priorities appear to have since shifted. According to Pranav Lal, Ethos' former director of Enterprise Systems, who worked at the company from 2021 to 2022, there was a “big push” internally to establish third-party partnerships. "Partnership business was … what they were placing most of their bets on, to increase the revenue,” Lal told Hunterbrook.

The numbers confirm the shift. Third-party revenue doubled in 2024 and grew another 79% in 2025, roughly twice the rate of the direct-to-consumer channel, which grew by 46% and 40% over the same period, according to Hunterbrook’s review of the prospectus and the 2025 10K. The third-party channel went from a quarter of Ethos’ revenue in 2023 to 37% in 2025, and 39% in the most recent quarter.1 Three banks covering Ethos noted the agency channel is taking a growing share of revenue, with Deutsche Bank forecasting it "becoming a larger component of the mix," in a sell side report in August.

And the agency channel appears heavily concentrated in just a handful of distributors. Ethos doesn’t disclose the breakdown of its agency partners, but Hunterbrook hypothesized a useful proxy: Ethos’ microsites for agents. Microsites are separate, personalized websites on Ethos’ domain that agents onboarded with Ethos receive and can share with their clients.

Hunterbrook’s analysis revealed an estimated 178,000 live microsites associated with unique agents. Nearly 70% of them belong to agents affiliated with just three agencies.

All three appear to operate on multilevel compensation structures.

At the top of the list is Family First Life, representing 42% of total head count, with the second largest agency, Global Financial Impact, trailing far behind at just about half of FFL’s head count.

MLMs also make up five out of the top six agency partners, representing nearly 80% of total agents on Ethos’ platform.

Ethos agencies’ websites don’t exactly describe themselves as MLMs. Eric Olson, founder of GFI, even explicitly denied GFI is an MLM in a 2024 video podcast with Ethos CEO Peter Colis. Olson is a former star agent at the World Financial Group,which faced a class action lawsuitfiled in 2018by former agents over worker classification and wage-and-hour claims. The plaintiffs also alleged a “massive pyramid scheme.” The firmsettledthat case for $65 million while denying liability.

Across social media and other marketing material, it’s clear Ethos’ top partner agencies rely on "downline" recruitment, which is MLM industry jargon.

One giveaway is the promise of “overrides” or “spreads,” the perpetual cuts of the commissions earned by an agent’s recruits, their recruits, and every layer stacked beneath them. The bigger the pyramid, the more the agent might earn.

Experior, number three in Hunterbrook’s ranking based on Ethos' agent microsites, even illustrates its compensation structure in the shape of a pyramid: each level holds a higher commission contract and keeps the 'spread' on sales by agents below. It’s a structure its co-founder Jamie Prickett calls a model "build on spreads," even while avoiding calling it an MLM, instead calling it a “Tri-brid.”

Equis, Ethos’ sixth-largest agency by head count, spells out exactly how much more people at the top of the pyramid can earn: A "Builder Bonus" of up to $50,000 a month compared with up to $5,000 for individual producers, subject to production requirements.

Publicly available FFL documents break down the numbers in the compensation structure — and the role Ethos plays in it. A copy of FFL’s 2023 compensation hierarchy marked “internal” shows FFL agents are assigned a “contract level” based on their own and their teams’ production: the more policies their recruits write, the higher their contract level.

That contract level determines the percentage cut of the first-year premium agents receive as commissions from carriers. A separate document called the “Comp Guide” updated as recently as August 2026 shows how an agent’s contract level affects their compensation for policies sourced from Ethos. The actual compensation rate varies depending on the product, but the link is clear: FFL’s compensation structure is difficult to climb without recruiting, and agents’ compensation for selling Ethos-sourced plans feeds directly into it.

Ethos designed its platform for that structure. In its 2025 10-K, it described its agency platform as built for “downline performance management” to help agencies scale and accelerate their business. CEO Colis emphasized the point at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs on September 9, calling Ethos’ platform “transformative for the agency owner” because it gives them “control over their downline agents' productivity.” Colis added, “We’re always recruiting and onboarding new agencies who roll us out to all their existing agents, but then also go and keep recruiting more agents to our platform at no incremental cost.”

To sustain their stream of recruits, MLMs aggressively pitch prospective recruits on the promise of riches. "I don't know what other business you can start for under 1,000 bucks and be making six figures, seven figures, sometimes eight figures in five to 10 years[ ]… if that fool can do it, I can do it,” a speaker said at an FFL training conference in Fort Lauderdale.

Social media posts by MLM agencies like FFL and GFI are filled with vignettes of successful agents making tens of thousands of dollars a month.

FFL CEO Shawn Meaike has even claimed his company has made more millionaires than anyone else in the sales industry.

The Federal Trade Commission warns that even talking about personal experiences during recruiting may be false or misleading if they don’t reflect the general outcomes for most participants.

Bonnie Patten, co-founder of consumer protection advocacy group Truth in Advertising, said such claims about business opportunities are deceptive by definition.

"Big claims like you can obtain financial freedom, quit your full-time job, replace your income… retire early. All those kinds of claims are just by definition deceptive because the MLM model in and of itself just doesn't provide that kind of income for the typical distributor," Patten told Hunterbrook in an interview.

That’s consistent with the FTC’s observation that MLMs’ emphasis on recruitment may be a feature of an “illegal pyramid scheme” resulting in an “insupportably large number of distributors” relative to real sales opportunities.

Hunterbrook's data analysis estimated that the 178,000 agents implied by Ethos' microsite count are more than 10 times the 15,000 active agents Ethos claims it has, defined as anyone who's sold a policy in the last 12 months. In keeping with the FTC's warning, that suggests roughly nine out of 10 agents might not have sold a single Ethos policy in the last year.

The microsites could presumably persist for someone who has left the agency. But the numbers also roughly track with FFL’s reported figures of current agents. The firm claims it has more than 80,000 affiliated agents; an estimated 74,000 microsites associated with FFL suggest nearly every FFL recruit is onboarded to Ethos. But only about 6,000 agents — or fewer than one in 10 of FFL’s 80,000 agents — wrote policies in July, according to an FFL Facebook post.

That’s typical of MLMs, William Keep, a retired business professor at The College of New Jersey who has studied MLMs for more than 20 years, told Hunterbrook. Almost all the inactive agents lose money, Keep said.

The FTC has also scrutinized, and faulted, FFL more directly. In December 2021, the FTC sent FFL a cease-and-desist letter finding that FFL was “unlawfully misrepresenting that consumers who become Family First Life business opportunity participants are likely to earn substantial income.” The FTC cited recruiting videos touting "$40k in a month" — similar FFL videos remain online. In August 2024, the Oklahoma Department of Securities issued an enforcement recommendation alleging FFL sold "business opportunities" without registration.

Experior has also faced regulatory scrutiny. In 2023, regulators in Ontario, Canada, named Experioras one of three insurance agencies using a “tiered-recruitment model.” In that review, 65 agents across the three agencies were cited for violations of the provincial Insurance Act, including 11 of the 30 Experior agents selected for examination.

Last year, State Rep. Melanie Ross Levin submitted a bill to the Delaware General Assembly that would require MLMs to disclose basic facts like how much their participants actually earn. The industry fought back hard, saying it would destroy their industry, Ross Levin told Hunterbrook, including by flooding her inbox with an alleged “10,000 emails” and threatening to storm her office with hundreds of lobbyists.

“If a little bit of disclosures closes down your industry, you know that you're hiding something,” she said.

FFL’s “Ethos Superstars”

Agents aren’t the only ones harmed by these recruitment mills. Ethos customers are exposed to MLM agents who have faced fraud allegations, carry criminal records, or have been barred from selling insurance.

Selling insurance without a valid license is illegal in every state. Ethos said in its 10-K that “agents must complete an annual compliance certification to access our platform;” that its contracts make agencies “responsible for supervising their affiliated agents,” and that it uses machine learning to monitor agent quality. At the Goldman conference on September 9, Colis said that machine learning “allows us to be less discriminating in onboarding our agents than we otherwise would have to be.”

But the system does not appear to catch everything. Ethos admitted as much in its 10-K, stating that its “ability to monitor and influence agency and agent conduct is limited due to a variety of factors.”

And the data suggests how limited Ethos’ monitoring abilities may be. As one example, a Top 10 weekly Ethos sellers list FFL published in 2024 includes at least two agents with regulatory records.

The agent declared the No. 1 Ethos superstar in a 2024 weekly ranking, for instance, had been fined by the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance the year before for multiple violations, including soliciting insurance business without a license and misleading advertising. Regulators said multiple websites that this agent ran advertised “guaranteed returns” of “up to 7%” with “no market risk” without specifying the “insurers or annuity policies that would produce such results.” His Ethos microsite, which invites customers to "Get instant life insurance" and "Schedule a call with me!" is live today.

Another FFL agent who appeared as No. 9 on the 2024 list, agreed to the permanent revocation of his Wisconsin license “based on allegations of violating insurance laws and lacking the character required of insurance intermediaries.”

Under the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) model act, which all states have adopted a version of, a license revoked in one state is grounds for revocation in every other state. If it’s the agent’s home-state license, their nonresident licenses elsewhere typically terminate automatically. And the National Insurance Producer Registry’s Producer Database, which insurance businesses can access for a fee, centralizes licensing information from all 50 states and incorporates regulatory-action records through the NAIC’s Regulatory Information Retrieval System—in theory allowing businesses like Ethos to efficiently identify problematic agents.

Yet, searching in enforcement databases in just five states, Hunterbrook matched 28 agents with live Ethos microsites to disciplinary records showing their licenses had previously been suspended or revoked. The reasons ranged from misleading customers about policies to submitting fictitious or invalid policy applications.

Other agents who have sold Ethos policies have questionable pasts unrelated to insurance, including grand theft, robbery, burglary of an occupied dwelling, false imprisonment, child neglect, methamphetamine and cocaine possession, and, in one case, video voyeurism and possession of images of animal sexual activity. All have an active Ethos microsite, though it’s unclear if they are still selling policies.

The lack of vetting isn't confined to rogue foot soldiers. A featured speaker at FFL's 2026 annual convention applied for his Pennsylvania insurance license in March 2024, three days after a misdemeanor conviction for carrying a firearm in public in Philadelphia. The state granted his license only under a consent order that lets regulators suspend the license immediately on any confirmed complaint for three years.

One of FFL’s senior leaders, who heads a large branch, was recently fined by the New York State Department of Financial Services for failing to disclose several criminal convictions on his “original application to act as an agent” in the state.At the pinnacle is FFL’s CEO and founder, who admits he had a cocaine habit and faced arrests for assault and drug possession. In 2019, he was arrested and “charged with third-degree criminal attempt” for “trying to board a plane with a loaded handgun.”

“PART OF THE PARTNERSHIP”

Ethos has said it isn't responsible for its third-party agents' conduct because they “operate independently.” But Hunterbrook found evidence of Ethos' longstanding structural ties with the agencies that challenges the company’s narrative of arm’s-length independence.

Since 2022, when FFL announced a partnership with Ethos, Ethos CEO Peter Colis and former Chief Distribution Officer Marty Schafer have personally appeared on FFL-hosted videos to promote the partnership and announce “exclusive” Ethos products “specifically” for FFL.

A TikTok video also shows Ethos sponsoring FFL agents through a new car giveaway.

GFI founder Eric Olson also highlighted GFI’s partnership with Ethos on social media in 2025, calling Ethos the “official tech partner of GFI” that is rolling out “exclusive” solutions for GFI. “GFI wouldn’t be where it’s at without Ethos,” Olson added.

Colis appears to be no stranger to GFI’s recruitment-based business structure. “You’re only going to go as far as the people you recruit into the business,” Colis said, speaking to GFI agents visiting Ethos headquarters in one video posted by Olson in January. At some point when your team gets large enough, you have to stop doing things yourself and focus on,”Am I recruiting the absolute best possible people and making them as successful as I possibly can?” Colis said.

In fact, Ethos appears to have helped bring GFI into existence. In a 2024 video podcast hosted by Ethos CEO Peter Colis, Colis asks Olson how "working with us helped launch GFI.” Olson pointed to Ethos’ tech platform giving GFI unprecedented speed in business turnover: “There's people literally getting recruited on a Wednesday that are licensed already Thursday, they're getting appointed with Ethos, and then Friday they're getting a paycheck.”

And perhaps the most concrete example of Ethos' role in the recruitment machine: Ethos sells abandoned applications on its website as leads to FFL, which then sells them to its own agents as “exclusive” customer leads. A former FFL agent described being compelled to pay thousands of dollars for leads.

For the agency owners, lead sales to their own agents appear to be a central source of revenue — and what drives the engine that concentrates income at the top of the pyramid, often at the expense of new recruits.

Ethos Leads Supporting the Pyramid

Ethos’s 10-K does not highlight selling leads, mentioning it only in passing with language like: "With our agent platform, agents can enroll in minutes, acquire high-intent leads, sell a policy the same day, and get paid as early as the next day." The filing doesn’t say where those leads come from, how much revenue they generate, or who buys them.

These “abandoned cart” leads, as FFL America calls them, are information that Ethos collects on consumers when they start a life insurance application on Ethos' website and don’t finish.

“We spend a lot of money for people to come to our website, and when people don't finish the application, after about a week, Ethos sells them as leads,” Nick Taylor, another Ethos representative who was at the recent FFL conference in Fort Lauderdale, told a Hunterbrook reporter.

FFL offers Ethos leads through ILC, or the Integrity Lead Center, Taylor said. (Integrity Marketing Group is FFL’s parent company). On its website, a branch called FFL America advertises two types of Ethos leads — “premium” and “value” — available through the Integrity Lead Center, “your one-stop shop” for quality leads.

Lal, the former Ethos director, confirmed to Hunterbrook that Ethos sold those leads as “part of the partnership.” He said individuals can’t buy leads unless they’re an established partner. Cummings told a Hunterbrook reporter at the September 10 FFL conference that there were “a couple” of other agencies Ethos sold leads to, but that he wasn’t sure if Ethos was going to keep those programs because “it might be more trouble than it's worth.”

In a 2025 FFL training video, an Ethos representative explained that leads run $8 to $18 apiece, depending on how “fresh” they are. Agents buy “15 or 20 of them a day,” or even 400 at a time, FFL agents co-hosting the video said. The Ethos rep added that the company generates “anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 [leads] a week.”

That’s as much as $270,000 maximum lead revenue potential per week, or an estimated $14 million a year, potentially shared between Ethos and FFL depending on the profit-sharing agreement.

It’s also millions a year FFL agents are paying into their own company, which is one of the model’s most controversial features: Agents may end up paying more to participate in the business than they earn from it. The FTC documented the pattern in a 2024 staff report, which concluded that participants' expenses "can, and in some MLMs often do, outstrip income.

In the training video with Ethos, FFL co-founder Andrew Taylor conceded as much: “Some people lose money,” he said, though he added, “I don’t know why.”

Patrick Teschke, a former agent with FFL and Equis, another Ethos’ partner MLM agency owned by the same parent company, Integrity, told Hunterbrook agents can spend thousands on leads that convert at rates as low as 5%. YouTube videos by FFL agents describe being pressured to buy leads, costing them $500 to $2,000 a week. One person described how spending $4,000 on leads made them “almost homeless.”

In at least one instance Hunterbrook found, buying leads isn’t optional.

At one FFL agency called Horizon, agents have been required to purchase leads weekly. A 2022 contract obtained by Hunterbrook required agents to commit to at least $500 per week and as much as $2,500 a week in nonrefundable lead “dues.” Agents were only allowed to opt for the $500 option for a total of three weeks.

Others may not be explicitly required to buy leads, but are intensely pressured to do so. Ethos’ CEO describes the cycle as a feature. A new agent, Colis told investors at the September Goldman Sachs conference, “can onboard, learn, sell a policy, get paid the next day a commission, reinvest those commissions in lead prospect — in lead buying or prospecting and so on and so forth.”

In an FFL leadership group chat in 2021 obtained by Hunterbrook, an FFL senior leader instructed the other managers to “reach out to ALL their new agents today and make sure they are buying leads TODAY.” That agent is now married to FFL President Shawn Meaike and shares his last name.

Numerous FFL videos on social media also feature FFL leaders aggressively messaging to agents on the need to buy leads.

“Don’t think about the cost,” FFL CEO Meaike tells agents in a video, promising them the worst thing that can happen is breaking even. In another YouTube video posted by an FFL executive, a speaker tells agents, “Your lead flow literally is your cash flow.” She added, “I don’t care if it’s your last $500.” Before joining FFL, this agent was a “top distributor” at Vemma, an MLM company effectively wound down by the FTC in 2016 as an illegal pyramid scheme that "compensated participants mainly for recruiting others rather than for retail sales."

At the September 10 FFL conference, the message was the same: “It's more dangerous to not get leads than it is to get more leads,” one speaker said during a panel dedicated to helping new agents overcome fears of spending so much of their own money on leads.

“You have to change your mindset from being an employee to a business owner,” said another. ”If you're a business owner, you have to have inventory.”

The leads may not be as valuable as their price tag suggests, according to Teschke. He said the ones being sold by the agencies as “exclusive” might have been sold to 50 other agents at a time.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say this,” he said, saying he pegged that number to the people he called, who consistently told him “you’re like the 50th person to call me.” His statement echoed a complaint from a Reddit user describing Ethos leads as “sold ten times over.” One former agent for FFL warned others about lead recycling on Glassdoor. “FFL is double-dipping, triple-dipping, quadruple-dipping ... on the same lead over and over again,” they said. The leads end up “being hounded by agents” over and over again. Others discussing leads on Facebook, however, appeared to like Ethos leads, with one commenter saying, ”Ethos Abandoned Cart leads are 🔥.”

A class action filed in 2022 alleged FFL earned $3 million to $4 million a week selling recycled leads to its own agents, although the case was dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction without any ruling on the merits.

Consent by “Click to Continue” to Personal Data Sales, Robocalls

Consumers who volunteer their personal information when applying for life insurance on Ethos' website may be unaware that Ethos distributes that information to third-parties for profit.

To see how easy it might be for shoppers on Ethos’ website to learn — and consent to — the fact that Ethos might sell their personal information to third parties, Hunterbrook reporters applied for life insurance on Ethos' website.

The only way Hunterbrook reporters found to opt out of data sharing was a single line buried in the privacy policy, bundled with other disclosures about personal data collection that users “agree to” by clicking “continue” to launch the online application.

Consumers who tried to apply for life insurance on Ethos’ platform have complained on the Better Business Bureau website and other consumer review sites about being harassed daily with calls from multiple “Ethos agents,” spoofed numbers, calls after 9 p.m., and refusals to stop after repeated opt-outs. One complaint said the agent even replied, "maybe you should stop submitting applications then."

Ethos' standard reply to the BBB complaints directs people to a “Make a Privacy Request” portal, which several complainants say did not help.

One reply amounts to an acknowledgement of how lead sales can go wrong. A complainant wrote that someone claiming to be an Ethos agent asked for her Social Security number "for medical records" and pitched an "upgraded whole life policy." Ethos responded, dated 10/28/2025:

"it is likely that the client's contact information was shared with some of our affiliates including licensed life insurance agents that may not be contracted directly through Ethos."

Hunterbrook found at least 10 federal robocall lawsuits against FFL or Integrity Marketing Group and eight separate lawsuits filed against Ethos since 2020. They describe the same pattern: consumers who had filled out an Ethos form received unwanted calls and texts from agents who wouldn't say who they worked for, with an Ethos-hosted invite link. Most are Do-Not-Call cases under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA.

In three of the eight Ethos cases, plaintiffs sued the agent or marketing firm they say placed the calls but also sought to hold Ethos responsible for that caller's conduct. The most recent case, filed in February, argued Ethos "ratified" the calls by knowingly accepting their benefits. It cited the defendant-agent's own admission that Ethos "provides him with computer systems, software, and leads."

Ethos acknowledged the risk in its 10-K filing, stating that the company has “received informational requests from governmental authorities and have been and may in the future be subject to investigations and enforcement actions … related to disclosures of personal information, including certain types of sensitive health information.”

Beyond the TCPA, however, consumers may have limited statutory protection. According to Harold Ting, a consumer advocate at the NAIC, there's no modern privacy law specific to insurance anywhere in the U.S.2 He described the consent shoppers give as largely illusory, with a privacy notice that "steers you into accepting that you're gonna share all your data" or made deliberately "challenging and difficult to understand." The practice, coined “dark pattern,” however, is not illegal in most states, Ting said, with an NAIC model rule requiring more explicit disclosures on its sixth year of facing industry opposition.3

Eric Troutman, a defense attorney and co-founder of the privacy and telecom law firm Troutman Amin, also agreed that Ethos’ privacy disclosure likely covers the company legally: Once a consumer clicks past even a boilerplate notice, he said, courts will generally treat that as permission to pass the information on. “These lead generators operate with very little risk because there's really no law that prevents them from selling the data as long as there's a disclosure," Troutman said.

Nevertheless, Troutman argued that lead generators share substantial moral culpability: “It's really the Ethoses of the world, it's the lead generators of the world, who are selling their data sometimes without permission, who are actually leading to all these robocalls down the line," he said.

Consumer Harm: Sold Up, Switched, and Signed Without Consent

Beyond spam calls are allegations of more serious harm to consumers conducted by Ethos’ third-party agents, documented across lawsuits and regulatory actions as well as consumer review sites and hundreds of videos and social media posts by former agents and industry watchdogs.

Ethos says, “We don’t employ a single commissioned agent, meaning individuals don’t profit from selling a policy, eliminating the temptation to hard-sell or upsell.”

That appears to be only partially true: Ethos’ third-party agents may not be direct hires, but they do profit from selling policies and appear to be routinely pressured to hard-sell, Hunterbrook’s investigation suggests. Agency leaders instruct agents to steer customers to more expensive products, train them not to take no for an answer, and push them to replace existing policies, according to former agents who spoke with Hunterbrook and on social media, and Hunterbrook’s analysis of publicly available training materials and videos.

Steering Customers to Products for Agent Benefit

"Steering" occurs when a seller pushes a consumer toward a particular product for the seller's benefit — say, an accumulation indexed universal life (IUL) policy— rather than the coverage best suited for the consumer.

Accumulation IULs combine life insurance with a tax-advantaged savings account whose growth is linked to a stock-market index. While insurance sellers often pitch features of these policies like downside protection, cash withdrawals, and tax-free retirement savings, many independent financial planners agree that accumulation IULs only make sense for very high net worth individuals.

For others, advisory sites and plaintiff law firms call them “complex and opaque” products often containing high, hidden fees that make them prone to lapsing, often misrepresented and missold by agents. But because they’re lucrative, MLMs often push IULs as their primary product, according to investment fraud law firm RP Legal.

Ethos representative Cummings described the same sliver of wealthy customers as IUL sales targets when asked by FFL agents at the conference: he explained that IUL policies are for clients who have already maxed out on 401k and still have money they “literally don't know what to do with" and who also need life insurance. "If you need the money in five years, this isn't for you," he said, and clients "need the discipline to put $500 away and not think about the cash value at all.”

Few average consumers fit that profile. Yet Ethos appears to have made a strategic decision to push IULs to a broader population, especially through its agent channel. In an earnings call earlier this year, CEO Colis described IULs as traditionally a product “dedicated to the high-net-worth market,” but that Ethos is making it “more accessible to the mass affluent market.” He added that “there is demand from agents for this.”

On Meaike's podcast, Ethos CEO Peter Colis said Ethos rolled out its branded IUL product specifically for FFL agents. In an October 31, 2023 video posted by an Ethos agent, Ethos’ then Chief Distribution Officer discusses Ethos’ new IUL product built “exclusively” for FFL. He said Ethos was giving away a $150 lead credit to agents who sold the policy discussed in the video before year end, and a free iPad for the first 100 FFL agents who sold the product.

Teschke told Hunterbrook agents were “brainwashed” to steer customers to IULs and other more expensive or lower-quality products. One reason: higher premiums, which means more commission. "My IULs I'm selling averaging 200 bucks a month rather than 90 bucks a month, I'm making a lot more on IULs,” Teschke said.

Agents also like IULs also because they have a lower lapse rate. In a blog post from last year titled “Why You Should Be Selling IULs,” FFL promises that “when structured correctly” IULs often bring “stable premium payments,” “larger average commissions,” and “opportunities to cross-sell,” not to mention higher retention. In another FFL podcast, an FFL agent explains that, because IULs tend to have a much higher monthly premium, policyholders are less likely to discontinue the policy because of the sunk costs. “It's like the fear of loss is too powerful.”

Consideration for whether or not the IUL is the best fit for the customer appears secondary, if existing at all. “A lot of times I’m not even showing them the prices,” one agent at a FFL training conference in 2020 said. “I run this pre-qualification to make sure they can get it … so I can easily do a product that’s potentially more expensive.”

Rather than explain how IULs work, Teschke said agents are trained to sell emotion: “They’re speaking emotionally to them about what that policy is going to do for them … rather than telling the honest truth.”

Another former agent spelled out the potential dangers to a consumer who purchases an IUL without fully understanding the policy: “Imagine a 70-year-old that cannot go back to work, and they bought a product thinking they are going to retire off of it and they take a couple years worth of loans,” Michael Garcia, a life insurance agent who used to work for FFL, told Hunterbrook. “They're over leveraged, the policy lapses, and all of a sudden, they have a massive tax bill because these policies grow tax deferred, not tax free.”

And, by Cummings’ own account, Ethos’ IULs are not the best out there. Cummings said he personally has two term life insurance policies with Ethos but that he opted to go with Mutual of Omaha for his IUL “because I wanted it to be underwritten and get better rates.” He said, “Mutual of Omaha has among the best IULs on the market,” adding he worked there for more than 15 years before joining Ethos.

Ethos’ efforts to push IULs nevertheless appears to be working. In its annual report, Ethos attributed the agency channel’s faster growth in 2025 to IUL and whole life products “which were mainly sold through the third-party channel.” Whole life, like IUL, is permanent insurance that builds cash value, unlike term, the simpler, lower-cost coverage that dominates Ethos' direct channel. Ethos reported triple-digit percentage growth in “other products” compared to a more modest 29% growth in term life products year over year.

The NAIC has repeatedly tightened guidelines on how insurers can illustrate IUL performance amid concerns that consumers don’t understand complex products like IULs.

Customers may also be getting steered toward buying more insurance than they need.

At FFL’s 2020 sales conference, a senior leader taught agents to talk homeowners out of their own estimates, inventing equity for the family to "lose" and a reason to buy mortgage protection. If a customer with a $250,000 mortgage says the house is worth $235,000, the agent should counter that "these same houses were going for around $300,000" before the 2008 crash, he said.

“What I’ve automatically done is I’ve given them $50,000 more dollars in equity in their house.”

FFL agents are compensated based on the premiums generated by the policies they sell.

Courts have previously punished similar conduct that relies on deceptive tactics to steer customers toward more expensive products. In what is believed to be the largest total of civil penalties ever under the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act, a Suffolk Superior Court judge ordered three UnitedHealth insurance companies, HealthMarkets, Inc. and its subsidiaries, to pay over $50 million in restitution for consumers and over $115 million in civil penalties to Massachusetts for misleading consumers.

HealthMarkets is a third-party agency that appears on Ethos' website.

The December 31, 2024 order was a result of a complaint filed by Attorney General Maura Healey, who said at the time, the companies’ business model “was to dupe consumers into buying supplemental health insurance products, which they did not know about, did not want, or were misled into thinking were necessary or valuable.” Healey specifically identified HealthMarkets as a repeat offender adding, “We are suing to recover the money taken from Massachusetts residents and ensure that this never happens again.” HealthMarkets has appealed the decision. The case is pending.

Churning: Unnecessarily Replacing Policies for More Revenue

"Churning" is a related insurance sales abuse that is explicitly prohibited under some state laws governing insurance sales. Under Florida law, churning means using an existing policy's value to buy a new one from the same insurer to earn a new commission, without a demonstrable benefit to the customer. Former agent Teschke said churning was built into how agents were trained. “They teach you to call your clients every six to 12 months; they call it a policy review,” he said. But what they’re implying without saying it directly, he said, is “to replace your own policies every year so you can keep making money.”

The customer absorbs the cost. Each replacement restarts the coverage, and charges can sometimes eliminate or reduce the cash value of the surrendered policy. It can also restart the contestability period — the two-year window where the company can investigate your medical history if a death claim is filed and refuse to pay out the benefit, Teschke claimed.

Indexed products, including IULs and indexed annuities, are structured in ways that encourage churning, said Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the consumer group Center for Economic Justice and a former chief economist at the Texas Department of Insurance. Such products cap the customer's upside, and the cap "isn't guaranteed. So after a year, the company can say we're reducing the cap to 7% or 6%," he said, and "at that point the consumer has a real interest in moving to a new product." The industry is "structuring this in a way that either encourages consumers to churn their policy or to lapse their policy," Birnbaum said.

Ethos appears aware of the practice. At the conference, Cummings explained to FFL agents that Ethos was clamping down on policy replacements because there was a perception that people were “unfairly replacing policies” by taking an Ethos policy and replacing it with another Ethos policy.

Ethos has also seemingly alluded to churning in its SEC filings, stating in a risk factor that agents working with Ethos may terminate Ethos policies and replace them with different policies “in an improper manner,” which Ethos prohibits in its contracts with its partner agencies.

Churning may be damaging for agents too. Teschke claimed senior agents often tried to replace policies written by junior agents with more competitive ones, taking the commission on the new policy and leaving the junior agent with a chargeback — the money Ethos and insurers claw back on the commission advanced to the agent if policies lapse or are canceled within the advance window.4 Teschke acknowledged that this is hard to prove, but said it might be one reason FFL pushes junior agents to sell Ethos and Americo, its two most sold products: senior agents know the policies are uncompetitive and can beat them with their more quality offerings.

The practice is visible to the public. A document titled “Ethos Script” on a FFL branch Relentless Insurance website provides a phone script apparently for calling people who didn’t finish their Ethos applications, and —- ironically — telling them: “Well the reason I'm giving you a call here is because it looks like you’re eligible for one of our preferred carriers with better rates.”

Another document titled “Rebuttals (Ethos Tailored)” seems to offer agents a one-size-fits-all script for leading existing policyholders into a new policy. Agents are coached to claim they should be able to see the customer’s policy but can’t, then to tell the customer that their coverage is “actually one of our secondary carriers that we will usually only place people with major health issues.”

Even a former Ethos underwriter agreed Ethos products were uncompetitive. "It's definitely more expensive … they're competing more on the sales experience than they are in price."

Impersonating Government Officials, Drafting Policies Without Consent

Jonathan Marcoulides made a simple mistake of googling for information on his own insurer, Primerica, to lower his premium. He called a number that appeared in the results. The person who picked up persuaded him to get a new, cheaper policy, but said he needed to re-submit his bank details because "banking information doesn't carry over."

According to Marcoulides, he called back just 10 minutes later only to find out that the agent was actually with Ethos, not Primerica. He told Hunterbrook that Ethos had already pulled $191 from his bank account. “I never said I was with Primerica," Marcoulides recalls the agent saying when confronted. It took a month and a complaint to Oklahoma regulators to get the money back from Ethos, Marcoulides said.

Marcoulides’ ordeal also echoes complaints across consumer review and social media sites accusing “Ethos agents” of pretending to be someone else or submitting a policy without their consent.

One shopper wrote in a Facebook post that, after filling out an Ethos application, he received a call from a woman who held herself out to be an official with the DeKalb County office of Georgia’s insurance commissioner.

A TikTok video shows a recording of an alleged FFL agent who claims he targeted veterans by introducing himself as from the “Veteran Support Agency” — a “bullshit” domain name, according to the shopper, purchased specifically to target veterans.

The website is real, and appears to be a lead generator. It asks visitors their contact information and directs them to an FFL agent who appears to have a dedicated Ethos microsite.

At Equis, call scripts obtained by Hunterbrook show some agents are trained to sound like they are connected with a governmental program or agency.

This conduct could violate the FTC’s Impersonation Rule, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and NAIC model regulations. The FTC’s Impersonation Rule, in effect since April 1, 2024, makes it unlawful to "materially misrepresent, directly or by implication, affiliation with, including endorsement or sponsorship by, a government entity." The Telemarketing Sales Rule prohibits misrepresenting affiliation with a government entity. And the NAIC model regulation, adopted by roughly two dozen states, bars anything that leads a consumer to believe solicitation is in some manner connected with a governmental program or agency.

The alleged misconduct has already begun to catch up to FFL agents, though not through Ethos. John Hancock recently terminated nine agents, all of whom were affiliated with FFL, for alleged insurance fraud and misrepresentation, including “impersonating clients to redraft policy premiums and/or cancel policy” without their authorization. When Hancock followed up with customers, it found that they never applied for a policy and were unaware the agents had opened an entirely new policy. One agent, the investigation found, was even paying for their customers’ premiums out of their own bank account.

Hunterbrook confirmed that at least four of the agents have since had their licenses revoked, three by Rhode Island and one by Utah, and two others settled with Rhode Island regulators. At least three still have active Ethos microsites.

And although Ethos doesn’t directly employ FFL, GFI, Equis, or other MLM agents, the company could still be responsible for their conduct, says Kati Daffan, a lawyer with consumer protection-focused firm Vaca Daffan and former Federal Trade Commission official.

“The law is clear. If an outsourced seller acts like your agent, you own their misconduct. MLMs add another layer because the incentives are critical,” she told Hunterbrook.

A repeated allegation in the eight federal telemarketing complaints against Ethos in the past five years is that agents avoided saying who they work for on calls. One plaintiff got only first names, apparently pseudonyms, and one caller declined to identify his employer’s proper name. Three of the complaints argue Ethos is liable for calls placed by someone else.5

Concentration Risk

Aside from potential regulatory risks, Ethos' reliance on third-party sales networks may be an earnings issue.

For one, the agency channel appears to be a much lower-margin business because Ethos keeps only the spread between the commission it gets from the carriers and what it has to pay the third-party agents.

The company doesn’t disclose profitability by channel, but blended margin dropped from 43% in the last quarter of 2025 to 39%6 then again to 33% in subsequent quarters. Management attributed the decline to channel mix and product mix in the agency channel — referring, seemingly, to a growing share of its business coming from whole life policies, which are less profitable for Ethos but demanded by agents.

Moreover, with nearly a third of its revenue tied to just three agencies, Ethos may be exposed to significant concentration risk if its relationship with those agencies weakens.

Already, Ethos’ edge as a technology-forward partner for independent agencies may be facing pressure from multiple angles.

At the FFL conference where Ethos reps were asked to apologize onstage for TruStage’s outage, Shawn Meaike pointed to another tech partner, Instabrain, as a potential replacement.

“Is there anything that Ethos does on their platform that you won’t do?” Meaike asked the CTO of Instabrain onstage. “No! That’s why we brought them here!” Meaike said, speaking to the audience.

Instabrain offers insurance agencies a similar tech platform to Ethos’ to write their customers’ policies and get approved in minutes. The Instabrain CTO said the company has been adding new carriers and their products on the platform. “Instabrain platform that we built to be the easiest platform in the industry,” he pledged.

Cummings didn’t seem to agree. Cummings said to a Hunterbrook reporter that he hadn’t heard “amazing” things about them, despite seemingly everyone at the conference talking about them.

Then there is Sammons Financial Group, another key partner of Ethos’ helping to drive its third-party revenue; a Sammons subsidiary, North American Company for Life and Health Insurance, underwrites the new IUL products for Ethos.

As Hunterbrook Media first reported, Sammons is deeply entangled with Guggenheim Partners, which faces an active federal criminal inquiry over its alleged failure to disclose related-party transactions. Sammons’ parent company is the largest single stakeholder in Guggenheim's holding company, and Sammons had been responsible for $130 billion of life insurance assets largely managed by Guggenheim. Sammons recently claimed it is reducing its exposure to Guggenheim.

Sammons' bonds fell to their lowest since being issued in June as the Walter investigation progressed.

Against this backdrop, some of those closest to Ethos have been unloading their stakes. Chief Executive Peter Colis, President Lingke Wang, and Chief Accounting Officer Brandt Kucharski have all sold shares in August and September. Some transactions followed previously adopted trading plans or covered tax withholding. Some of Ethos’s early venture backers have been selling, too, including Google Ventures, which has shed close to 46% of its stake.

It’s, perhaps, unsurprising, considering how far Ethos has moved from its original pitch.

A company that offered consumers a way to bypass commissioned agents now seems to depend on winning — and keeping — those agents’ business.

In 2019, Ethos presented its direct-to-consumer model as a way to protect customers from the incentives of traditional insurance sales.

“In the commissioned sales model, overselling is in the agent’s interest,” Brett Wilson, then Ethos’ vice president of risk and actuarial, told an interviewer. The company’s ambition went beyond moving applications online: “We’re not putting a website on top of a traditional insurance process.”

Not even a decade later, Ethos depends deeply on third-party agents. And the company builds products specifically for multilevel marketing agencies, helps their recruits get appointed and paid, and sells unfinished applications as leads for agents to pursue.

It’s generated quite a bit of business. It also may have created a meaningful liability for Ethos.

“If a payout structure encourages aggressive tactics or claims, it’s hard to claim the sellers went ‘rogue,’” Daffan, the consumer-protection lawyer and former FTC official, told Hunterbrook. “You could be ratifying the conduct by reaping the profits.”

Ethos, FFL, GFI, Equis, and Experior did not provide any comment as of the time of this publication.

Authors

Jenny Ahn joined Hunterbrook after serving many years as a senior analyst in the US government. She is a seasoned geopolitical expert with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific and has diverse overseas experience. She has an M.A. in International Affairs from Yale and a B.S. in International Relations from Stanford. Jenny is based in Virginia.

Michelle Cera trained as a sociologist specializing in digital ethnography and pedagogy. She completed her PhD in Sociology at New York University, building on her Bachelor of Arts degree with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also served as a Workshop Coordinator at NYU’s Anthropology and Sociology Departments, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research methodologies.

Ruth Reader has spent more than a decade reporting on the business and politics of technology and health care. Many of her stories concern how technology impacts American life and wellbeing, including how social media and artificial intelligence are affecting young people, the grassroots movements that have emerged to litigate and ultimately safeguard these technologies, and how tech companies influence major policy. She has been a staff reporter at POLITICO, Fast Company, VentureBeat, and Mic.com. She has also written for the late Baltimore City Paper and produced radio and video segments for New York Public Radio, Voice of America in D.C., and CBS Baltimore. She graduated from Columbia College with a bachelors in journalism.

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Editors

Vikas Kumar joined Hunterbrook from The Capitol Forum, where he led the corporate investigations team for a decade as a senior editor. He was previously an attorney at Gordon Feinblatt, a trial attorney for the Department of Justice, and a law clerk for a federal judge. He has a J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law and a bachelor's from Emory University. Vikas is based in Maryland.

Jim Impoco is the award-winning former editor-in-chief of Newsweek who returned the publication to print in 2014. Before that, he was executive editor at Thomson Reuters Digital, Sunday Business Editor at The New York Times, and Assistant Managing Editor at Fortune. Jim, who started his journalism career as a Tokyo-based reporter for The Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report, has a Master’s in Chinese and Japanese History from the University of California at Berkeley.