MediaAlpha, Inc.

What is alleged

On 7 August 2025 the FTC announced a $45 million settlement with MediaAlpha, Inc. and its subsidiary QuoteLab, LLC, resolving allegations arising from their online lead generation business.

According to the FTC, MediaAlpha’s lead generation sites presented themselves as a way to shop for health insurance, and used that premise to collect consumers’ sensitive personal information. That information was then sold to telemarketers and auctioned to third-party lead generators, who used it to place calls.

The result, the FTC alleges, was consumers bombarded with millions of illegal robocalls and live telemarketing calls, including calls to more than a million numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry since 2018.

Alleged violations

Section 5(a) of the FTC Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and the Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses. The impersonation count rests on the allegation that MediaAlpha led consumers to believe it was connected to the federal government.

Beyond the payment, MediaAlpha is barred from misrepresenting that products it markets are affiliated with government-approved programmes that do not exist, or that they offer benefits MediaAlpha has not verified.

Why a lead generator is on a fraud tracker

Lead generation is a business-to-business service, and this entry is here for buyers of that service as much as for the people who were called.

The FTC’s guidance published alongside the settlement is unusually direct about where liability lands, and it is worth quoting in substance rather than paraphrasing loosely. The agency states that lead generators should avoid assisting or facilitating others’ Telemarketing Sales Rule violations, and that where a company knows or consciously avoids knowing of a partner’s unlawful conduct but still provides substantial assistance, that itself can be a violation. A company cannot avoid responsibility for deception it facilitates by burying its head in the sand.

For any business buying leads, the practical consequence is that not asking where the leads came from is not a defence.

Scale of the enforcement pattern

The MediaAlpha settlement was announced the same day as a $100 million settlement with Assurance IQ, LLC over health insurance marketing, making $145 million in a single day across the seller and the lead broker feeding it.

What is not established

A settlement resolves allegations without any admission or finding of wrongdoing.

We have not yet contacted MediaAlpha for comment. When we do, the attempt and any response will appear on this entry.