It was the Friday before Christmas, and with the newsroom running on a skeleton crew, Fabio Leite, editor of the São Paulo bureau of the news website Metrópoles, needed a story for the home page.
With news running thin, he decided to take a gamble. Since September, an elderly woman he knew had been complaining to him about unauthorized monthly deductions from her pension by someone using the name Association of Retired Mutualists for Collective Benefits (Ambec for its initials in Portuguese). Leite had advised the retiree to contact the national social security agency INSS to block the withdrawals and recover her money, but the charges continued.
A quick Google search for “Ambec” turned up countless complaints on Reclame Aqui, a consumer complaint website.
“Something felt very off,” Leite told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
Leite assigned investigative reporter Luiz Vassallo to dig into the story. A search of the São Paulo Court of Justice website quickly uncovered more than 600 lawsuits against Ambec—and over 2,000 nationwide. Retirees said they had no idea who was deducting money from their accounts, or why.
The sheer number of potential victims made it easy to contact some of them and hear their stories. That same afternoon, Vassallo discovered that someone had registered Ambec under the name of a person working as a dental assistant, but strong evidence pointed to businessmen with ties to the Centrão, a powerful bloc of center-right parties known for trading political support for government favors, as the real owners.
“I said, ‘let’s get this story done quickly,’” Leite recalled.
Neither of them knew it at the time, but the headline they published the following morning of Dec. 23, 2023 —“Non-profit registered under dental assistant’s name scams retirees”—would kick off one of Brazil’s most impactful investigative series in recent years. Over dozens of reports spanning nearly a year and a half, Metrópoles exposed an alleged network of fake non-profits suspected of illegally deducting from retirees’ INSS accounts more than $353 million (R$2 billion) from January 2023 to April 2024 alone.
After the Federal Police launched an operation in April 2025—an investigation that cited Metrópoles reports dozens of times—INSS President Alessandro Stefanutto and Social Security Minister Carlos Lupi were removed from their positions. The federal government, scrambling to contain the damage, has started refunding retirees for the deductions, while the opposition seized the moment to push for a Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the scandal.
The massive fallout from the case underscores journalism’s power to shape a nation’s life, from the highest levels of politics to the monthly bills of elderly people living in poverty. Yet the reporter who broke the story and led the investigation says that for much of the year-long effort, it felt like his work wasn’t having an impact.
“I spent so long covering this pretty much on my own,” Vassallo told LJR. “I kept thinking, ‘Man, this isn’t going anywhere.’”
Fabio Leite (left), editor of Metrópoles in São Paulo, and investigative reporter Luiz Vassallo (right); the duo uncovered the illegal discount scandal at Brazil’s Social Security (INSS) (Photo: Rodrigo Freitas/Metrópoles)
On Christmas afternoon 2023, Vassallo filed a request under Brazil’s Access to Information Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação, or LAI), a law enacted in 2011 that guarantees citizens the right to request and access public information.
He was seeking details on which non-profits had cooperation agreements with the INSS — their membership numbers and the amounts being deducted. He got a response in January, but most of the information was missing. He appealed to the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU). The pressure worked, and by the end of March, the INSS finally released a spreadsheet with the data.
Vassallo gives credit to the Electronic Citizen Information System, an online platform that allows anyone to file federal information requests.
“The federal system should be a model for all public institutions,” he said. “People sometimes criticize the Access to Information Law in Brazil, but it works.”
The spreadsheet revealed shocking information. INSS had authorized 29 non-profits to apply “monthly membership fee deductions” directly to retirees’ retirement and pension benefits in exchange for supposed services like healthcare. About half of these non-profits appeared well-structured, well-known, and genuinely committed to serving retirees. However, the other half matched Ambec’s profile: dubious origins, recent establishment, and rapidly ballooning membership numbers, Vassallo said.
More than 60,000 retirees across Brazil sued these non-profits, most of them claiming they never signed up for the services, Vassallo said. In just 2023 and early 2024, the non-profits raked in over $353 million (R$2 billion) through these deductions.
“At the time, we said, ‘This is a pension deduction spree,’” Leite said.
After spending two or three days organizing the data and reaching out to INSS officials and company representatives, Metrópoles published a major scoop: “Pension deduction spree generates $353 million (R$2 billion) in 1 year.”
The report revealed staggering numbers. Combined, the non-profits’ monthly revenue surged from $15 million (R$85 million) at the start of 2023 to $44 million (R$250 million) by year’s end. Ambec alone grew from 40,000 to 600,000 members in just 15 months, generating $5.3 million (R$30 million) per month.
A legal framework created by unions in the 1990s to protect retirees, called Technical Cooperation Agreements (ACTs), provided the basis for these deductions. Non-profits explicitly had to obtain retirees’ signed consent to validate the deductions.
However, newer non-profits ignored this rule and forged memberships using fraudulent methods, including alleged telephone authorizations, Metrópoles reported. In some cases, the courts had already proven the existence of fraudulent enrollments.
“In the cases that reached a verdict, the non-profits presented very weak arguments in court,” Leite said.
Throughout the reporting, the accused deny affiliating people against their will, a position they have maintained to this day.
The Metrópoles investigation pressed on. After that first Christmas-time report, Vassallo’s articles focused on Maurício Camisotti, a businessman from the healthcare sector who appeared to be the real owner of Ambec, as well as several other non-profits. After exposing the full scale of the reported pension deduction spree, sources from within the non-profits began handing over documents to Vassallo. He said those documents showed that Camisotti and other businesspeople from the insurance and health sectors were actually running the companies. The result was this story was published in early April 2024.
“Once you publish something like this, people who know the inside story—or who’ve fallen out with the current owners—start coming to you,” Vassallo said. “People would reach out to me or send documents showing who was really in control.”
More stories followed. On July 1, 2024, Metrópoles published a report revealing the lavish lifestyles and political connections of the non-profit alleged managers. In September, they uncovered that even a defunct beach tennis league had been turned into an “non-profit” supposedly offering benefits to retirees.
The journalists had long known that the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU), the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), and the INSS itself were investigating the deductions. In July, INSS Benefits Director André Fidelis was dismissed over the scandal.
Even so, Leite described the initial response from other media outlets as “timid.” He said he believed one reason was that the spreadsheet containing critical data initially remained private, which made it difficult for journalists to pursue the story. Occasionally, major programs like Jornal Nacional—Brazil’s leading national evening news broadcast—ran segments, but these mostly recapped Metrópoles’ investigation without adding significant new developments.
Isolation in coverage aggravated the subjective cost among journalists given the pressure they were under. Vassallo and Leite said representatives of the groups involved in the scheme tried to intimidate them and Metrópoles’ management in an effort to stop the reporting. Despite unwavering support from the outlet’s management, they describe relentless attempts to silence them—including public smear campaigns labeling them “enemies of retirees” and discreet financial offers to drop the investigation.
“They sent all kinds of people to try to stop me, even going over my head to talk to my bosses,” Vassallo said. “They sued me, threatened me outside of court. They tried to wear me down at all costs.”
But the reporting didn’t stop. Nor did the alleged fraud. On April 11, 2025, Metrópoles reported that since its first article, only one non-profit had ended its contract with the INSS. Between April 2024 and March 2025, 21 entities deducted a staggering $370 million (R$2.1 billion) from retirees—an average of $17.6 million (R$100 million) per non-profit. By then, a CGU audit had found that 98% of retirees said they had never authorized the deductions.
The scandal finally boiled over this April. Eight hundred Federal Police officers launched a massive operation, carrying out 211 search and seizure warrants and six arrest warrants across 13 states and Brasilia. Their stated mission: to dismantle a nationwide scheme of unauthorized deductions from retirements and pensions. According to the Federal Police, most victims were retirees living on minimum-wage pensions.
Federal Police officers in front of a Brazilian Social Security office, during an operation in April (Photo: Brazilian Federal Police)
That same day, a court order removed then-INSS president Alessandro Stefanutto from office, along with four other members of the agency’s leadership and a federal police officer. The court documents authorizing the operation mentioned 38 Metrópoles reports. Social Security Minister Carlos Lupi was dismissed on May 2.
Since then, the INSS fraud scandal has dominated Brazil’s political headlines. Data from the Federal Court of Accounts indicate that, although the deductions began during the Bolsonaro administration, they nearly quadrupled under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government. The political damage is undeniable, and last Monday, May 26, the government began refunding retirees for the amounts that had been deducted.
After working nearly alone for more than a year, reporter Luiz Vassallo and editor Fabio Leite now find themselves among hundreds of journalists covering the story. They continue following developments, pushing authorities to ensure that compensation doesn’t become an empty promise and that those responsible don’t escape justice. Of all the outcomes their work has produced, the refunds to retirees are what make them most proud, they say.
“The most gratifying thing—far beyond stirring up all this political upheaval—is knowing that the people who suffered harm will get their money back,” Leite said. “It’s very rare for someone who’s been robbed to recover what they lost.”
Vassallo agrees: “This is the correction—the cure for the disease.” For him, this kind of impact is precisely what gives journalism its meaning.
“We do journalism to protect people like this—the most vulnerable—from abuses like these,” he said. “From people who live in São Paulo’s most expensive neighborhoods and think they can get away with anything.”
