This article originally appeared on Linkedin in October 10.2022 and is written by Scott Nichols.

Will you be helping your competition this AEP by making sales?

That sounds crazy doesn’t it? Even so, whistle blowers are coming forward to tell their stories. YouTube & Podcast are being broadcast by those affected by some of the harmful fallout from all of the acquisitions going on in our industry. Alarm bells are being rung, but still many agents ignore them and it is getting very late. So what can you do as a regular field agent selling Medicare plans to protect your BOB’s data?

I was fascinated as I listened to the “whistleblower” tell their tale of how these conglomerate acquisitions are structured. The huge conglomerates offer the brokerage owners single to double digit millions of dollars to be paid between 1-3 years. For this vast amount of money, the brokerage owner stays on and manages his existing downline producers with one catch. The brokerage owner is to heavily promote to the downline agents the “real time” leads from the new conglomerate entity they have “partnered” with.

The question is where these “real time” leads come from ? According to the whistleblowers account, they are from books of business from other acquired brokerages by the same conglomerate!

What the whistleblower described was a scenario where the conglomerate buys agency A & agency B. They sell agency A’s book of business as “real time” leads to agency B and vice versa. The brokerage “partners” are to promote the purchasing of these “real time” leads to their downlines for a period of 1-3 years to hold up their part of the buy out agreement. A podcast added that this data is also sold in the open market too. That the data is sold 11 to 15 times over!

So where do they get the actual data from? I don’t know but it seems easy to guess.

I would imagine if you are using the brokerages FREE Medicare enrollment system and you clicked to agree to the User Agreement (which you didn’t read because it is a mammoth legal document) you gave ownership of the entered data to the data vendor plus, the use of it. That kind of supply chain of “LEADS” would keep a former brokerage owner busy selling I think. I know this is hard to accept. We have no way of confirming these whistleblower reports but there are more whistleblowers coming forward all the time. There are stories of new agents emptying their bank accounts to buy these “leads”. The people who broadcast these stories and interview the whistleblowers are even being sued.

This doesn’t seem like a big secret really as we have seen the affects of this activity growing annually. Every year our clients get more and more calls, text, emails etc. DNC list, unlisted numbers, et al make no difference, but it is happening.

So what can you do, right now, to help protect your company, career, and book of business?

We were faced with this same issue in my brokerage. My FMO sold out to one of the conglomerates. We were worried and should have been.

One big thing we did was invest in the creation of an agent built and serviced Medicare system and STOPPED using their FREE system. This was expensive, but it helped us to feel that at least our client data was secure moving forward.

We decided to start making this system available to independent agents and agency’s across the USA. No recruiting. No required hierarchy change. A low cost subscription service to help independent Medicare brokers. Less than $1 per day.

For a low subscription fee, agents could stop feeding LEAD MILLS & CALL CENTERS and OWN THEIR DATA.

Is this article an ad? Is it not self serving? My answer to this is yes, but someone in our industry had to step up and make an attempt to protect the independent field agent selling Medicare plans without an ulterior motive.

We have to face the threat that our upline FMO’s have used us as a commodity. That whistleblowers are coming forward and stating that they are selling our data to huge conglomerates who are then selling it to each other as “real time leads”!

We must start banding together to protect our businesses, careers, and futures. I have invested heavily in the creation of an independently owned Medicare system to protect us from these threats. By your keystrokes starting on Oct 15th you will decide the future of your book of business, agency, and future career.

-Scott Nichols