business, and it can be very lucrative. Basically, anytime someone creates an instrument where they are owed money can sell that instrument at a discount to an investor, and a broker puts the deal together.
It can be done with any kind of income stream like lottery payments, private mortgage loans, factoring, and you can sell and buy partial parts of the stream, too - like maybe the next 10 years of payments on a 30 year note.
I dabbled in it a bit a long time ago. The cool part was that as a broker, I could pretty much decide how much I wanted to get paid on each deal, and massage the numbers to make sure it worked for everybody. The Wentworth commercials are an effort to take brokers out of the equation, and get straight to the sellers. That's what makes the ads worthwhile.