Hey, T. Martinez here to tell you about NPR Plus.

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Learn more at plus.mPR as murderers, it's scammers.

And HBO has two great new documentary projects out about two very different scams.

The first one is about a high school football team that came from what turned out to be

a non-existent high school.

The second is about telemarketing scams and how hard it is to stop them.

Both stories are about not just the very colorful nitty gritty details of a successful

scam but also the conditions and the systems that make scams possible.

I'm Linda Holmes and today we're talking about two great new documentaries about

scammers on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining me today is one of the hosts of NPR's

Code Switch podcast Gene Dembe, hey Gene. What's good with you Linda? So good to be here.

It has been way too long since we had a chat. Way too long. Way too long. Way too long.

I want to start with Telemarketers.

It is a three-part series that just finished airing on HBO.

You can also stream it on Max.

The story of this series is that in the early 2000s a kid and I do mean a kid he was 14 when he started

named Sam Lippman Stern was working at a New Jersey telemarketing outfit and it is so New Jersey called Civic Development Group which used telemarketing to raise money for supposedly charitable organizations.

The one that gets the most attention in the series is that they raised money on behalf. charitable organizations.

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