Politics is a lucrative business, and campaign operatives routinely take office seekers for rides. Sometimes that is because they are unscrupulous, and sometimes that is simply because the operative makes errors or because the candidate just can’t cut it. (After all, most candidates lose.) “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” the political scientist Adam Sheingate told Molly Ball in The Atlantic in 2016. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.”

It’s hard to feel much pity for candidates who light their campaign cash on fire. But the kind of people who give to scam PACs are more sympathetic. CMF, for example, relied heavily on telemarketing, which is both an extremely expensive method of raising funds—it requires live people to call would-be donors—and one that, like direct mail, is particularly effective at targeting older and often less sophisticated, more vulnerable people.

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About $9 million of what CMF raised went to an Akron, Ohio–based telemarketing firm called InfoCision, according to ProPublica. Devoted readers will not be surprised to see the firm’s name here. As I reported in a pair of pieces on Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential run, the Carson campaign was raising astonishing amounts of money—but it was also spending eye-popping amounts. FEC reports showed that much of the money was being plowed back into direct mail and telemarketing fundraising. A lot of it went to a direct-mail firm run by Carson’s chief fundraiser, and big chunks also went to InfoCision and Eleventy, another company based in Akron.

In summary, Carson was raising cash from possibly unsophisticated donors and then spending it to raise more cash from unsophisticated donors. Carson didn’t end up with much to show for it—he was polling fourth, in single digits, when he dropped out in March 2016, though he did end up with a Cabinet position for which, by his own account, he was not qualified. But the vendors made a neat buck. InfoCision had previously been a major payee for a dubious PAC run by Newt Gingrich, which, as of mid-2015, had raised $1.25 million and spent $1.38 million, but gave just $2,500 to candidates.

Still, those numbers look like a model of efficiency compared with CMF’s ratios. The modus operandi—call people up, solicit money for a specific cause, and then spend next to no money on that—sounds a great deal like a standard variety of scam, Carolyn Carter, the deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center, confirmed to me. (Carter noted that the state and federal laws that govern what tax-exempt organizations can do are complicated, but in general, deceptive practices are barred.)