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That secret website is home to a sprawling network of what appear to be “scam PACs”—a derisive name for groups that style themselves as a charities while being registered as political committees, recycling the majority of donations back into shady fundraising and telemarketing groups that are often tied to the PAC operators themselves.
What makes this secret call site so unique is, in fact, its website, which offers a rare glimpse into the workings of a shadowy, largely unregulated—and extraordinarily lucrative—operation. (The website is archived here.)
According to The Daily Beast’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the 43 client PACs on the call center website have raised more than $140 million in the last two election cycles alone. That’s a staggering amount of money—more than former President Donald Trump has raised in total for his flagship Save America PAC.
The call center has so many PAC clients that it maintains two lists. They feature some of the most notorious groups in the country, including Law Enforcement for a Safer America, a sort of scam PAC clearinghouse that was the subject of a CNN investigation in 2020.
Scam PAC Rats
Upon reviewing the website, Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the groups fit the “scam PAC” bill.
“This seems like a clear scam where the only reason the PACs exist is to drive money back into these companies,” Libowitz told The Daily Beast.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance law expert and deputy executive director of watchdog group Documented, said that federally registered scam PACs are lightly regulated.
“The FEC has little authority to regulate misleading fundraising appeals, and PACs are allowed to spend their money on almost anything,” Fischer told The Daily Beast. He noted that while candidates cannot use campaign funds for self-enrichment, “PACs are not subject to those restrictions.”
While the website’s owners appear impossible to trace, the client list offers at least one clue: about half the PACs listed on the site are also at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2021, and which remains unresolved.
That lawsuit identifies a network of 24 PACs and four companies, tying all of them to one man: Richard Zeitlin. (Zeitlin has denied wrongdoing.)
PAC Man
These PACs purport to advocate for veterans, police, firefighters, and sick or disabled children, ostensibly by endorsing lawmakers who will stand up for those issues. But according to the lawsuit, the Zeitlin companies “place millions of calls on behalf of these Scam PACs seeking donations for the sole purpose of having those funds funneled back to the Zeitlin Companies by the Scam PACs’ complicit treasurers.”
The website is chock full of other information: scripts for payment processing and “rebuttals” to donors, as well as what appears to be a set of automated soundboard operating instructions for answering questions from difficult, impecunious, or skeptical donors. (The call center keeps a list of charity clients, too, but more on that later.)
The most notable element in the payment processing scripts is that they never tell donors that their PAC donation is not tax deductible until after the payment has gone through.
The automated soundboard replies are also revealing, especially considering that many targeted donors are elderly.
Sounding off
For instance, in a scenario where a potential donor doesn’t know their own address, the soundboard operator asks the donor, “Do you have a piece of mail that you can get it from?”
The soundboard replies also suggest the operators might be deceiving donors about having made contribution pledges that they didn’t actually make—or at the very least don’t remember making.
For instance, if a donor is told they’ve been contacted because they made a prior pledge, but they don’t recall if or when they made that pledge, the board operator is instructed to respond, “I show here we spoke with you a few weeks back.” If the donor asks again, the operator is instructed to respond, “I don’t show the exact call date. My records indicate it was sometime last month.”
Script reading
Then there’s the question of whether the target donor understands that they aren’t giving to a charity, but a registered political group. Here’s how the script sidesteps that issue.
If the customer asks for the phone number for the PAC, the response is, “Unfortunately I don't have that information.” The operator then offers to give the PAC’s website address.
(The script acknowledges that this donor might be too sophisticated, offering a side note that tells the operator, “This will be a dead deal.”)
The PAC sections also have what appear to be call scripts. They often dance around outright saying what a PAC actually is—especially when the question is about tax status.
But not all call center clients are PACs. Some, it turns out, are registered as charities. They’re just not as lucrative. And in order to dance around federally regulated nonprofit laws, they have to be more crafty.
Charity stripe
For example, there’s the “Firefighter Cancer Alliance,” run out of Knoxville, Tennessee, by former scam PAC operator Alan Bohms. The FCA website no longer exists, but according to an archived version from 2022, it was actually a program of the Volunteer Firefighter Alliance. (So is another charity listed on the page, the National Volunteer Firefighter Alliance.)
According to tax records, the VFA raised about $6.6 million in 2020. The document also claimed it spent only $1.9 million on professional fundraising. And while the organization lists a number of notorious telemarketing companies as payees, it’s nowhere near the same ratio that the PACs exhibit.
However, the filing also says the group’s total fundraising costs came out to $4.1 million. It’s not immediately clear exactly where that money went. Salaries ate up another $341,000, and management expenses were about $708,000—which together equal the costs for the organization’s actual programs ($1.2 million). Most of those appear to involve direct mail.
Read the full story here.
