The package arrived at Cindy Lohman’s home in Great Mills, Md., just two weeks after she learned that her son, Ryan, a 24-year-old Army sergeant, had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. It was a thick envelope from Prudential Financial Inc., which handles life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Inside was a letter about her son’s $400,000 policy. And there was something else, which looked like a checkbook. The letter told Ms. Lohman that the full amount of her payout would be placed in a convenient interest-bearing account, allowing her time to decide how to use the benefit. In tiny print, in a disclaimer that Ms. Lohman said she did not notice, Prudential disclosed that what it called its Alliance Account was not guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, according to a report in Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Ms. Lohman, 52, left the money untouched for six months after her son’s death in August 2008.

As time went on, she said, she tried to use one of the checks to buy a bed, and the salesman rejected it. That happened again this year, she said, when she went to buy a camera.

Ms. Lohman, a public health nurse, said she had always believed that her son’s life insurance money was in a bank insured by the F.D.I.C. That money  like $28 billion in one million death-benefit accounts managed by insurers  was not actually sitting in a bank.