Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.” leaves audiences aghast – and maybe wondering whether there’s any end in sight to the jaw-dropping, industry-infesting graft portrayed by two guys who first met at a notorious New Jersey call center known for scamming consumers.
When Lipman-Stern and Pespas reunited years later, they found the CDG-style playbook had become the gold standard in cold-calling for money. The series alleges that even police fraternal organizations are in on the grift, either taking a cut or looking the other way. Lipman-Stern and Pespas, former perpetrators, became investigators.
Q: At what point did you realize that you guys weren’t just raising money for charity, that something more complex was going on?At first, I just thought, ‘Oh, this is how police organizations and charities raise their money.’ It wasn't 'til a few years later that I started realizing, ‘OK, wait, we might be involved in something much darker.’One night on the 10 o'clock news, I saw one of the veterans charities we worked with. Turned out it was a fake charity.
The second and third episodes of “Telemarketers” documents the duo’s unlikely journey from phone scammers to documentary filmmakers to amateur sleuths — reuniting after years away from CDG, with a shared mission: to expose the rampant corruption in the telemarketing industry. Their tiny film crew storms the offices of bureaucrats with a focused and confrontational Pespas leading the way and asking the hard questions. At some point, he starts to refer to himself as a freelance journalist. By then, he swapped his baggy sweatshirts for a plaid sport coat, dark glasses and a beret.