There have been “viatical settlements” in the life insurance industry for years. Essentially, an entity looks for existing, in-force life insurance policies that can be purchased from the owners. Their gamble is that the insured person dies (so a claim can be made), sooner rather than later.
The advantage to the policyowner (often the insured person), is that they can get a cash payment before death, as the viatical company will generally pay the cash value of the policy, to acquire the ownership rights.
The purchasing viatical company does an analysis as to whether the insured is likely to die within a certain time frame, kind of reverse underwriting. Possibly they took it too far in this situation.
I wasnt sure who/what Apollo was. I guess its an insurance company.
When I was much much younger, we used to joke about a get rich quick scheme where you would go out and find people of high risk and low means (drug addicts, etc) and offer to buy them a life insurance policy to pay for their burial needs when those arose (likely soon based on the demographic). Buy a $10k policy and pay $1K for burial and make yourself beneficiary (1980 prices). Never took it seriously, but seems like Apollo did.
Apollo are scumbags.
If one had to guess which hedge fund would be engaging in this behavior-Apollo would be near the top of many lists.