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Should my friend sign up for this company's life insurance?

Asked by Mimishu1995 (23628points) October 26th, 2020

My friend has a mental health condition that forces her to be on medication for life. Yesterday she messaged about a “secret”: she was signing up for a company’s life insurance because she wanted a safety net in case her disorder got out of hand. She wanted it to be a secret because her parents don’t believe in insurance They seems to be confusing insurance and government’s benefit, which they don’t have a good opinion about. I have never heard about that company before so I was naturally suspicious. I asked her where she got the name and she told me her art teacher recommended it to her, and she insisted that the woman wasn’t trying to sell anything which I don’t quite buy in because I don’t know the context of the conversation. And so far that woman was the only one who recommended it to her, which further made me suspicious.

The company’s name is Generali. You can easily find it on Wikipedia. It’s an Italian insurance company that caters for Europe and East Asia, according to Wikipedia. The problem is that so far that’s the only English website about the company that I could find. All other Google results are in Vietnamese. So my suspicion is now on the Vietnamese company and not the Italian one. This could be a company trying to use the fame of the Italian company for profit, but I don’t know.

Here’s what I found about the Vietnamese company so far.
– Most Vietnamese results are just ads about how great the company is. There is virtually no customer’s review. There was an article yesterday about the company winning some award, but that’s the only thing on the Internet that isn’t an ad.
– The company’s insurance services have extremely confusing name: “Confident Life package”, “Safe Life package”, “Optimistic Life package”... Their descriptions don’t help either, as they are so vague I still can’t understand how one service is different among another. They are all just the same “protect you from ill health” thing except for the “Golden Shield package” which is for preventing cancer.
– There was an article on the company’s fraud back in 2019. Basically they scammed someone’s money by manipulating their terms of service. But that article was copied from another website, and I can’t trace the original article.
– Their Youtube channel is so far the most bizarre. The channel has been around for years. The views of their videos fluctuate to the extreme: one video has more than 500k views, and the very next video has only 72 views. And most videos have no comment. But the videos from 3 months onward got insane amount of views and comments. Those videos are a series of badly acted shorts about how to raise a child or something. The company is listed in the credit as some sort of sponsor for that series. It looks extremely suspicious to me because the company advertises itself to be around since 2011, but was only getting attention 3 months ago.

I don’t know much about insurance apart from the most basic things so I can’t conclude anything. My friend said she has 21 days to consider the company’s policy, and this would involve a lot of money. I just can’t leave this alone if this turns out to be a scam, especially when she told me, at the end of the day, that she would sign up for her sister too if she is satifsied with the insurance.

Can you help me make sense of it?

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