Captive Clientele
Henriques exposed a trail of deceit through which thousands of American soldiers were sold misleading insurance policies, often by former military officials who were operating with the knowledge, if not the approval, of the Pentagon. Her reporting revealed how former military officers were allowed by base commanders to make formal, official looking presentations to financially inexperienced soldiers headed off to war. Soldiers were sold insurance policies at ten, twenty, even fifty times more than the insurance provided by the federal government. As she dug deeper, Henriques found complicity from the top for all kinds of deceptive tactics, all designed to trade on the presumption of the soldiers that they would not be cheated by their own. She showed too, how in the face of pressure from big financial interests, the military brass would cave, in one case abandoning the investigation of a big financial company whose products and sales practices were suspect. The impact of Henriques’ reporting was fast and powerful, resulting in new laws, refunds and the like.
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