Odds Skew Against Investors in Bets on Strangers' Lives

By MARK MAREMONT And LESLIE SCISM
WSJ

In the summer of 2005, a firm called Life Partners Holdings Inc. said Marvin Aslett, an Idaho rancher 79 years old, had two to four years to live.

It didn't make this estimate on his behalf but for its customers. The company arranges to buy life-insurance policies from people like Mr. Aslett and sells fractional interests to investors, who collect the death benefits when the insured people die.

The investors in a $2 million policy on Mr. Aslett's life would have made a tidy return had he died as projected. But more than five years later, the rancher, now 84, says he runs on a treadmill, lifts weights and chops wood, adding that all of his grandparents lived well into their 90s.

"I'm healthy as a horse," he says. "There's going to be a lot of disappointed investors."

(More here.)