Development

In 2001, Sam Lipman-Stern began working at Civic Development Group, a telemarketing firm focused on raising money for police organizations. Lipman-Stern, an aspiring filmmaker, began recording all the debaucherous events at the office, including employees doing drugs, getting tattoos, and employing sex workers in the office bathrooms, activities that were all permitted as long as employees made their quota. Lipman-Stern began posting the videos on YouTube, eventually getting fired due to videos being public online. Lipman-Stern was informed by his co-worker Pat Pespas that Civic Development Group was keeping the majority of donations raised. This, coupled with the firm being penalized “$18.8 million, the largest penalty ever handed down in a consumer protection case”, ^[2] by the Federal Trade Commision, inspired Lipman-Stern to expose the company on film.^[3] He and Pespas began a documentary project, hiring crew off Craigslist and investigating the company and interviewing charity experts and victims of scams. Just as they were getting furthest in the investigation, Pespas disappeared, relapsing into his substance abuse and the documentary was shelved.^[4]

Filming

Lipman-Stern continued work on the project sporadically, including some scenes shot whilst he attended film school at Temple University.^[4] In 2019, Lipman-Stern met his cousin-through-marriage, filmmaker Adam Bhala Lough, who was running All Facts, a documentary production company with a partnership with Rough House Pictures, the production company headed by David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Jody Hill.^[5] Hearing the story of CDG, Bhala Lough asked Lipman-Stern to loan him the footage, which was in multiple formats and largely unlabeled. Lough spent a weekend in Joshua Tree National Park watching the raw footage, and came to the conclusion that a project could be made with the material. He and Lipman-Stern began developing the project.^[6]

The rough, New York Metropolitan-area feel of the footage reminded Bhala Lough of the films of his friends Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie. Bhala Lough sent footage to them and asked them to direct the project, but they were unable to commit due to their obligations to the film Uncut Gems. Lipman-Stern and Bhala Lough then developed the project into a docuseries, with the Safdies boarding as executive producers via their Elara Pictures banner, as did Green, McBride, Hill, and Brandon James of Rough House.^[7][8][9] In 2020, after the show had been pitched and acquired by HBO Documentary Films, Lipman-Stern and Pespas resumed their investigation with a full production team. They reached out and interviewed several police lodges that had been the beneficiary of telemarketing funds, as well as Scott Pasch and David Keezer, the owners of Civic Development Group, who declined to participate.^[10]

Year-end lists

Accolades

• Gotham Independent Film Awards 2023 - Breakthrough Series – Over 40 minutes (nomination)^[20]
• Critics' Choice Documentary Awards 2023 - Best True Crime Documentary (winner)^[21]

Blumenthal's response

United States Senator Richard Blumenthal’s appearance in the series finale was widely criticized. Despite promising the filmmaking team an hour-long conversation, Blumenthal cut short the interview with Pespas after three minutes and failed to provide any meaningful responses to Pespas’ findings on the telemarketing industry, leaving the room and having his staff usher the filmmakers out, after further promising that his staff would meet with the filmmakers. Blumenthal and his team would ignore all attempts at follow-up contact by the filmmakers in the months following the interview.^[22]

Nearly two weeks after the finale aired, Blumenthal issued a statement that he planned to request appropriate agencies to review their actions and recommend policy changes regarding the kind of telemarketing fraud that the documentary covered. Specifically, he was “preparing to send letters to the heads of the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Trade Commission this week, requesting that each agency conduct a review of their tactics and recommend policy changes to help regulators step up enforcement against unscrupulous callers who “prey on” Americans’ goodwill and political contributions.”^[23]

Pespas' disappearance

On October 2, 2023, less than two months after the series premiered, a media release was published revealing that Pespas had been missing since September 29 and had been last spotted in a bar in Pittsburgh. The filmmaking team relayed messages from Pespas’s family and friends asking for help in locating and returning him home.^[24] On October 26, 2023, director Lough shared on social media that Pespas had been “found and returned safely to his wife”, thanking those who had helped in the search and asking for them to now respect Pespas and his wife’s privacy. ^[25]