In high school I actually worked at one of these organizations. It was the typical boiler room you might imagine: Grubby, dirty office space in a forgotten retail center with dingy cubicles consisting of a beat up desk, a phone and a stack of 3x5 cards to call. We were taught to do just about everything we could to convey that we were active duty officers calling for donations, without actually saying that. Middle class citizens were all too often happy to donate or, in our case, buy tickets to what I assume was a non-existent fund raiser because of who they assumed we were. The whole system felt 100% fraudulent from top to bottom.

I lasted about 3 months and moved onto telephone sales for a major retailer. Back then if you had a deep voice you could make way better money than your friends working at fast food, etc.

I can recommend telephone cold calling as a means for getting an extremely harsh but powerful lesson in reading people via voice tone very very quickly. :)