Indiana woman refiles National Life lawsuit over IUL that returned 0%

An Indiana woman, unhappy with an indexed universal life policy that returned 0%, refiled a lawsuit against National Life companies.

Earlier this month, Chief District Judge Christina Reiss awarded summary judgment for National Life on breach of contract, deception, and racketeering claims made by Sanya Virani. However, the judge gave Virani 20 days to refile an amended complaint.

Virani filed an amended complaint Thursday, going into more detail on her claims.

Virani lived in Massachusetts when she purchased an IUL policy on Sept. 8, 2023, the amended complaint said, with a face or base coverage amount of $2,767,336. The policy offered Virani interest crediting strategies, including “Fixed-Term Strategies” and “Indexed Strategies” – the returns from which are credited to the policy’s accumulated value.

The lawsuit describes the US Pacesetter No Cap Annual Point-to-Point Indexed Strategy.

Virani allocated 100% of the accumulated value under her policy to the US Pacesetter Index, the complaint states. According to her 2024 Annual Statement issued by National Life, 0% interest was credited to her account as a result of that allocation for the period September 22, 2023, to September 21, 2024.

A 0% return is the floor in many IUL policies. Virani failed to state a valid claim that she was deceived during her life insurance purchase, Judge Reiss wrote in tossing the previous complaint.

'Deception' in buyer's guide alleged

In her new filing, Virani goes into detail on the buyer’s guide, alleging that National Life engaged in “material misrepresentation and deception” by omitting the fact that the Pacesetter Index was an “excess” rather than “total return” index.

Specifically, the insurer disclosed that the Balanced Trend Index was an excess return index but did not make a similar disclosure with the Pacesetter Index, the lawsuit states.

“This omission, especially when coupled with the affirmative disclosure that Defendant did make concerning the Balanced Trend Index, had the capacity to mislead a reasonable consumer into believing that the Pacesetter Index was a (more valuable) total return index,” the lawsuit claims.

As in earlier version of the lawsuit, the new complaint notes that National Life promised indexed strategies with 20 years of historical performance when the two indices were in existence for only a fraction of that time.

“[R]ather than a twenty-year historical trend, the manufactured, misleading performance was based on a highly speculative back-cast model such that these indices had less than a 1 in 1,000 chance of performing consistent with the misleading ‘historical’ performance,” the amended complaint states.

'No realistic chance'

To date, Virani has paid “tens of thousands of dollars to defendants in policy premiums,” the complaint said. She could cancel and surrender the policy. However, the surrender charge is $49,618.33 in the first year of the policy, gradually declining to $5,202.59 in the tenth year, the complaint said.

Virani claims that her policy had “no realistic chance” of ever attaining the historical returns shown in the back-tested history accompanying the index she chose.

Virani acknowledged signing a statement that read: “I have received a copy of this illustration and understand that any non-guaranteed elements illustrated are subject to change and could be either higher or lower.”

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InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton has covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @INNJohnH.