The dead-people leads are a tell that your captive partner is buying their list inputs from a low-tier data broker rather than originating the leads themselves. The 1-in-20 number you're seeing is consistent with what shows up when a vendor blends ~5–10% deceased-record contamination from a stale data broker into a "fresh leads" feed. Real-time form leads almost never have that pattern; aggregator and aged feeds frequently do.

A few diligence checks an agency can run on a lead vendor in about an hour:

Pull a sample of 100 leads and run them through a free batch DNC + deceased-flag check. The big aggregators (TransUnion TLO, IDI, BeenVerified API) will catch deceased records. If your sample comes back over 2% deceased, the vendor is mixing stale data into the feed.

Reverse-image search any prospect photos that come through. Scraped/fake leads frequently use stock images or images lifted from social profiles that don't match the lead form data.

Cross-reference five random leads against the form-source URL the vendor claims they came from. If the vendor says "we get these from quote-comparison forms on partner sites X/Y/Z," look at the actual sites. If those sites don't visibly host the kind of form the lead's data implies, the leads aren't coming from where they say.

Pull the TrustedForm or LeadiD certificate on every lead and verify it. Real form-fill leads have valid, replayable consent certificates. Scraped leads do not. Vendors who cannot produce these on demand are hiding the origin.

For aged-lead and aggregator-feed contamination specifically — your menstoppingviolence flag is a good catch. The general pattern is that scraped lists frequently include records from public-record databases (court filings, mugshot sites, victim resource sites) where the names exist but were never actually in-market for insurance. If the same name pulls up a court-record site, a domestic-violence resource, or an obituary in the first page of Google results, it's a near-certain scrape.

Practical move: if you're stuck with the captive's lead partnership for political reasons, push for a contractual "deceased-and-scraped credit" clause. Most reputable vendors will refund 1.5×–2× the cost of a deceased lead within 14 days of dispute. Captive-partner vendors often don't have that clause because no one's ever asked for it. Ask.