Las Vegas telemarketing company chief Richard Zeitlin was given 10 years in prison after being found guilty of a fraudulent fundraising campaign he ran with computers that mimicked human voices.
Zeitlin tried to get money out of people for Vietnam veterans, police dogs, breast cancer victims, missing children, kids with cancer and disabled children, David A. Fahrenthold and Camille Baker reported in The New York Times.
"He raised more than $145 million, mainly small gifts from small donors, but he kept at least 80 percent of it," the report said. "For the most part, Mr. Zeitlin did that legally — exploiting loose rules and lax regulation of fund-raisers, and becoming an infamous example of how donors’ generosity could be quietly siphoned into private hands."
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He also set up a website to criticize any reporter who investigated him and would sue any regulator.
The whole thing came crumbling down.
The report walked through his rags-to-riches story of going from a kid working at a telemarketing company that used voice actors who would never mess up the script.
“It’s actually so easy to conduct highly exploitative and harmful activities as a charity fund-raiser, without breaking the law at all,” said Laurie Styron, the executive director of a watchdog group, Charity Watch.
Zeitlin's one rule was not to lie.
"They were free to mislead callers by implication, telling donors they were calling for a cancer charity, then keeping most of the money themselves. But they could not tell a provable, specific falsehood — saying, for instance, that the donors’ money would be used to buy cancer drugs if it would not," said the report.
Many of his clients were quickly shuttered by lawsuits after being proved as get-rich-quick scams pretending to be nonprofits.
"By 2016, Mr. Zeitlin was raising $19.6 million for charity and keeping $17.3 million of it, according to federal charity filings," the report said.
Even when states came after him, he would pay minimal fees to resolve the situation and move on.
Then, the FTC blocked soundboard recordings in charity fundraising. In politics, however, they are still allowed, so he went to work for political action committees. It wasn't as lucrative as people didn't want to give money to politics the way they did for children and puppies.
He then violated his one rule — and switched up the script.
“Your support helps the handicapped and disabled veterans by working on getting them the medical needs the V.A. doesn’t provide,” said a call script for a PAC called the U.S. Veterans Assistance Foundation.
The feds pounced on the slip.
On Tuesday afternoon in a New York courtroom, Zeitlin begged U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, “My whole life, I’ve been afraid of being broke. It made me make some very bad decisions."
“You have been a liar your whole life,” Judge Kaplan clapped back. “And I’m not persuaded that I haven’t just heard more of it.”
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay an $8.9 million fine.
