When golf-ball-sized hail and 60 mph winds slammed the east coast of Florida in May, Chris Jadin came home to a truck covered in dents and glass all over the floor of his house, his skylight shattered by the falling ice. He would soon find out that the damage was even worse: he would need to replace the entire roof of his house, and soon, because hurricane season was less than a month away.

Like hundreds of thousands of homeowners in Florida, his insurance company was Citizens, often dubbed the “insurer of last resort” – a state-run option meant for homeowners who can’t find coverage anywhere else. But when he called Citizens, Jadin said he was surprised to hear that it could no longer help him. Citizens had transferred his policy to Trident Reciprocal Exchange, a brand-new insurance company he had never heard of. Jadin’s experience is part of a much larger push to “depopulate” Citizens and push Florida homeowners into new, often untested insurance companies. Sometimes, it happens without them knowing and against their will. Consumer advocates and industry critics say that some of these companies are more interested in quick financial gains than lasting protection and might be siphoning profits instead of saving for future disasters.   CBS News has spoken with former executives and other insiders familiar with Trident’s operations who allege that the company is doing just that: diverting millions of dollars in customers’ premium payments to investors — dollars that are supposed to be used to pay future claims. The whistleblowers say that this exposes the company — and homeowners — to the risk of insolvency.

Chris Jadin shows CBS News correspondent Ash-har Quraishi where hail wind damaged his home

Sources and internal documents reviewed by CBS News describe a deal Trident struck with an investor-owned affiliate called Triton Re that, according to Trident’s former chief financial officer, would only serve to enrich investors at the expense of policyholders.

It's the continuation of a worrisome trend at the heart of Florida’s insurance market — and a warning for homeowners nationwide.

Between 2021 and 2023 in Florida, nine property insurance companies went insolvent, leaving their customers suddenly without protection in the most hurricane-prone state in the country. The market dried up and homeowners couldn’t find insurers willing to take their money. More than 800,000 people found themselves with no other option but the state-run Citizens, which suddenly became the No. 1 market leader in Florida home insurance.

California has been up against a similar crisis in recent years. When State Farm said it would stop insuring in the state, it forced homeowners onto the California FAIR plan, its state-backed option of last resort.

When Florida’s local insurance companies began to fail, critics suspected that their investors may have hastened their demise by taking excess profits instead of shoring up surplus funds to prepare for disasters, as experts say reputable insurance companies are supposed to do. Early last year, the Tampa Bay Times unearthed a report from the state’s insurance regulator that seemed to confirm many of those fears, showing that while insurance companies were reporting losses to the state, they paid high fees to less-regulated sister companies, which raked in billions of dollars in profit.

Backed by extensive documentation reviewed by CBS News, the sources claim that investors at Trident took control over the company from its founder and spun up an affiliated business entity to drain the insurer of money. The whistleblowers CBS News spoke with say that without those funds, when a real disaster inevitably hits in the future, Trident may not be able to protect the nearly 16,000 customers whose money they are taking today.

When reached for comment, representatives from Trident disputed these claims and said their affiliate transactions were legitimate and industry standard.
 

“Sir, you must be mistaken”

When Jadin was told that Trident was his new insurer, he tried to roll with the change.

He said he had never filed a claim with Citizens — or any insurance company for that matter — so he didn’t know what to expect. At first, his experience was smooth: Trident sent an adjuster, who confirmed he needed a new roof and sent him an estimate of nearly $30,000. Jadin said he knew a reputable roofer, who told him the estimate was reasonable, so he signed a contract for the work and got started. He thought everything was on track until he got a call from a different roofing company he’d never heard of.

“I was like, ‘Sir, you must be mistaken. I have a roofer’,” Jadin said.

When he called Trident, they told him they were invoking their “right to repair” — an insurance concept where the carrier may require a policyholder to fix damage using the company’s preferred contractor rather than cutting a check.

The switch was so new, Jadin didn’t even have a contract from Trident. He was told that this shouldn’t matter because Trident had merely “taken over” his Citizens policy and all the old terms should still apply. But there was one problem: the words “right to repair” didn’t appear anywhere in that older policy. Jadin read it over and over and he concluded Trident was quoting policy language that didn’t appear to exist.

“It was infuriating,” he said. “I mean, these people telling me that, ‘No, we're kind of screwing you over, and you kind of have to eat it, and that's just the way it is’."

Finally, Jadin called a lawyer, who threatened to sue Trident. Before the case ever went to trial, the company agreed to compensate Jadin the amount they originally offered him in an estimate.

In the past, Trident may have had to cover Jadin’s legal bills, but recent laws intended to protect insurers from lawsuits made that a lot harder now. Jadin won his dispute but came out behind.

“They just did exactly what they were going to do in the first place,” said Jadin. “But it cost me $3,000 to make them do that.”

The takeout engine

Over the past two years, Florida managed to get 17 new insurance companies to enter the market. Most are doing business solely or primarily in the Sunshine State. Since then, rates have begun to decrease, albeit slowly, and homeowners have started to see options other than Citizens for the first time in years. It’s a remarkable turnaround that has been propelled by one powerful engine — the “takeout program.”

After the insolvencies of 2021 and 2022, Citizens swelled to a peak of 1.4 million policies, representing a dangerous liability for the state, and by extension, all of its policyholders.

That’s because Citizens hasn’t always been able to keep a surplus of cash capable of paying millions of claims or anything close to it. In the event of a large natural disaster, the state-run company can raise needed funds by assessing fees on all insurance companies in the state, who pass that charge directly to customers. Left unchecked, this can lead to a downward spiral where insurance gets more expensive and less profitable, more companies leave, insurance gets even harder to find for customers, and the process repeats.

To "depopulate" Citizens, the state lets private insurers peruse the policies, cherry-pick what they think are the best and safest homes, and take over those contracts. It’s a distinct advantage for a new company. It can quickly acquire customers without the usual costs like agent commissions or marketing. Without spending a dollar on advertising, a company like Trident can go from nothing to $100 million in revenue in 18 months.

These changes have helped usher in new options for customers, but consumer advocates worry that it might attract companies more interested in easy profits than long-term solutions.

“It becomes a form of corporate welfare,” said Doug Quinn, a consumer advocate who runs the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. “You'll see a lot of these undercapitalized companies coming in specifically for takeouts.”

Recent legislation has made the takeout program even better for insurance companies. Customers can now be removed from Citizens against their will. If a takeout company offers them a policy that costs within 20% of their old bill — even if it’s higher — they have to take it.

“Either way,” said Quinn, “you’re going to be moving out of Citizens to a company that may or may not be safe, that may or may not increase your premiums dramatically in further renewals.”

A big pile of money

When Maria Moller started Trident in 2024, she said, fast profits were not top of mind.

“The insurance business is a patient business and I’m a patient person,” she told CBS News.

Originally from Colombia, Moller moved to Florida in the 1990s and built a career around property insurance. She worked at all levels of the business, from controller to compliance officer to chief financial officer. By the time Florida companies were going bankrupt in record numbers, she had amassed more than 25 years in the industry and was ready to strike out on her own.

In 2024, she found investment capital through Chris Johnson, an entrepreneur who had recently sold a successful fence-building business. He had little experience in the insurance industry but was able to gather about $25 million for the initial capital. Moller was to be CEO, with Johnson as chairman of the board.

In less than a year, the company fired her.

Moller said that she and Johnson had intense disagreements about how to handle its early revenue and whether to keep those takeout premiums inside the company’s accounts where it could be used to pay claims.

The company had a North Carolina affiliate called Triton Re that was set up as a reinsurer. Like insurance for insurance companies, reinsurers take a fee or a cut of homeowners’ premiums in exchange for covering a portion of losses from big disasters.

She said that Johnson pushed for a contract with Triton Re that would cost Trident millions and provide little in return.

“All that does is to take money out of the exchange and goes to another company for no benefit,” said Moller in an interview.

Florida insurance companies, which are exposed to huge risk, pay a lot for reinsurance and must use the little that’s left to pay expenses and build surplus reserves. These reserves of cash can often determine whether a company survives or fails after a storm. In years without a hurricane, there can be temptation by investors to take the money left over after reinsurance as profit, according to Dan Tighe, an attorney who represents claimants against insurance companies. Especially for aggressive investors, he says, it’s hard to take the long view, which is one reason why insurance is so highly regulated.

“They're sitting on a big pile of money that's supposed to stay there to make sure, especially in a soft market, their reserves should be growing,” said Tighe.

In Florida, state regulators limit insurer profits. For years, insurance companies have looked for ways around those limits. One common move is to run the business through an affiliated contractor owned by a holding company. Called a “managing general agent,” the carrier essentially pays itself large fees to run the business. If the fees are high enough, the investors can extract profit that would otherwise be restricted at the main, regulated insurance company.

Triton Re is not a management company. It’s a reinsurer. But whistleblowers told CBS News they believe the arrangement served the same purpose: moving money out of the insurer and into an affiliated company under terms that left Trident with less money to build surplus and pay future claims.

In written comments to CBS News, Johnson wrote that Moller’s termination had nothing to do with Triton Re, but rather for “underperforming” and a “self-dealing scheme where she enriched herself and her husband to the tune of almost $400,000”. Johnson also said Moller fell far short of her own projections, and that the board brought in a consultant to evaluate the company's technology, which led to the discovery of Moller’s alleged self-dealing scheme. Moller said she formally opposed the Triton Re transaction in December 2024, along with the company's chief financial officer.

The company had used FAScorp, Moller’s husband’s IT company, to set up computers and networks for the fledgling startup. Immediately after firing Moller, Johnson, through Trident’s holding company, sued her and her husband’s company. The lawsuit claims Maria hired FASCorp “without the knowledge or approval of Plaintiff’s board,” but Moller denies that, saying that Johnson and the holding company were aware of the arrangement from the start.

“FASCorp and my husband, Greg, were involved with the company from its earliest stages, well before Trident became associated with Mr. Johnson or his investors,” Moller said in a statement. “There was never anything hidden about his role.”

She said Johnson’s account obscured the larger fight over Triton Re, which she saw as a way to bleed money from Trident rather than strengthen it. The two sides are now locked in arbitration over her firing. Johnson said Trident prevailed on summary judgment; Moller countered that the ruling was a partial award on a narrow legal issue and that the case is ongoing. Moller has also sued Trident and its executives, directly accusing them of mismanagement and regulatory violations, including the Triton Re deal which the complaint calls the “reinsurance scheme to convert revenues” from the insurer into the control over Johnson and other investors.
 

Short gains

John Ter Louw, who joined the company as Chief Financial Officer shortly after the deal with Triton Re was decided, said he never liked the arrangement with the affiliate.

“I was not a huge fan of it,” he told CBS News.

The deal would leave Triton Re responsible for 50% of all claims, up to certain limits. In return, the insurance company would pay Triton Re 50% of its premiums over the course of the contract, which initially covered roughly half a year. Such terms are not unusual and can help insurance companies weather costly disasters. In this case, however, the contract started late in the winter of 2024 at the very end of Florida’s hurricane season, Ter Louw said.

The deal meant Trident was giving up half of its income when hurricane season was already over.

“There was very little concern,” said Ter Louw. “I think it was like 11 or 12 days' worth of hurricane season and that was it.”

In an email to management, he wrote that the only reason for this deal “was to remove profits from [Trident Reciprocal Exchange] and into other entities.”

Internal documents show Johnson himself described the deal similarly. In an email to Moller in December 2024, he wrote that the reinsurance deal “has presented a far better opportunity than any of us realized for the investors to make an extraordinary amount of money essentially risk free.” Johnson later told CBS News that "risk free" was shorthand for "hurricane-free," meaning the company had made it through hurricane season without a catastrophic event. He said it was not an admission that the contract lacked legitimate risk transfer.

All told, said Ter Louw, Trident sent more than $28 million in homeowner premiums to Triton Re. Typically about a third is paid back to the main insurance company in the form of commissions, which would leave at least $18 million going out the door. In its latest financial filings, Trident posted a loss of more than $1 million before fees and taxes.

In written comments, Johnson argued that it was Moller herself who masterminded Triton Re and included it in some of the earliest pitch documents. Moller said that while she advocated for the creation of an affiliated reinsurance company, the structure that was ultimately put in place was not her design and was not part of the Plan of Operation approved by state regulators. She argued that despite his claim of no operational involvement, Johnson personally pushed through the profit-diverting contract over her objections.

“I was not there to make any short gains. I was not there to lend myself to do transactions like this one,” she said. “I was trying to build an insurance company that would have a long-term longevity. That’s what I was looking for. But his objective and mine were very different. And that’s the issue.”
 

The regulator’s role

CBS News spoke to multiple people with inside knowledge of Trident’s operations. All alerted the state insurance regulator about their observations. Moller wrote to the state Office of Insurance Regulation as early as January 2025 while still employed as CEO.

While some sources told CBS News the OIR followed up with questions, most say they are disappointed in the agency’s response and are waiting for more concrete action. The regulator has far-reaching powers and could do anything from fining the company to removing executives to forcing a sale of the entire operation.

The stabilization of the insurance market has been a major point of pride for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who in 2022 pushed through reforms making it harder for customers to sue insurance companies or avoid having their policies taken over from Citizens without their permission.

“We are seeing nothing but good news across all data points for Florida’s auto and home insurance markets,” said Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky in a January press release touting lower rates for Citizens policyholders. “These positive results are entirely related to our historic tort reforms, driven largely by Governor DeSantis’ leadership."

“We will hold firm in our commitment not to go back to the broken insurance market of the past,” said DeSantis in that same release.

Critics of the industry say that all this momentum might leave the industry under-regulated. “There is a concern that maybe the regulators are looking out for themselves more than they are for the consumers,” said Quinn, the consumer advocate.

Still, there are signs that the state is beginning to scrutinize Trident’s operations.

Internal documents reviewed by CBS News show that, in a recent audit, Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation took a look at Trident’s contract with the affiliate Triton Re and didn’t like what it saw.

In a letter to the company’s chief operating officer, Eric Anderson, auditors noted that the terms were so favorable to the reinsurer (and unfavorable to Trident) that it was nearly impossible for the reinsurer to lose money. The auditors said the agreement put so many restrictions on how much Triton Re could pay back in the event of a claim, it would take two hurricanes in a two-week period before the reinsurer would pay more money than it took from Trident.

“It is unlikely the Company would experience two hurricane events in the two remaining weeks of hurricane season,” the auditors noted.

Chris Johnson, chairman of Trident’s board, wrote that this kind of reinsurance contract is “a commonly used vehicle by many carriers to plug holes in their reinsurance program” but did not respond to specific questions about the flow of money through Triton Re. He added that, as an investor with no official operational role in the company, the Triton contract was Moller’s “brainchild from day one and had nothing to do with the investors.” Moller disputes that characterization, telling CBS News that Johnson personally executed the agreement on behalf of Triton Re.

The OIR would not comment on Triton Re specifically but wrote, “Affiliate arrangements and associated fees are a standard practice nationally and the OIR continues to advocate for—and exercise—the highest level of scrutiny to ensure these arrangements are not used to undermine the financial stability of Florida’s domestic market.” The agency noted that Trident is currently undergoing routine financial examinations which include a review of affiliate transactions. It said that recent legislative changes gave the agency new statutory authority to examine affiliates with the same rigor applied to primary insurers — tools the agency said it did not previously have.

The regulator added that it was aware of disclosures made by Moller and others and that they “have been subject to rigorous review.”

Florida’s boom and bust cycle

An article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune begins: “A growing number of homeowners get their insurance from tiny, untested companies that have a few million dollars in the bank but insure billions worth of property they could never hope to rebuild on their own. No one knows what will happen when the next big storm strikes Florida shores. But the signs are not promising.”

These words were not written in 2026, but in 2010 by Paige St. John, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. After 16 years, five major hurricanes, and repeated efforts to stabilize the market, these words now read less like history and more like a warning.

When St. John was writing, Florida insurance was in a now-familiar crisis: legacy insurance carriers were leaving the state and homeowners were forced into Citizens. Then, as now, the state worked to off-board those Citizens customers onto new, small companies that were just entering the market.

Many of the companies from that era went insolvent, leaving homeowners once again scrambling for coverage in the wake of storms. The whistleblowers who spoke to CBS News say Trident shows how that cycle can begin again: a new company grows quickly from takeout policies and shifts millions of dollars to affiliates, leaving the insurer itself with less money to build surplus and pay future claims.

Customers like Chris Jadin did not choose to become part of this experiment, but homeowners like him will bear the consequences if it fails. The question now is whether Florida has finally repaired its broken insurance market or once again built it on a foundation too weak to withstand the next big storm.

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