I-Team: The DeKalb Shop-With-a-Cop Scheme

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. - It's one of the most heart-warming stories of the Christmas season. They call it Shop With a Cop.

Officers use donation money to go toy-shopping with disadvantaged children. But an undercover FOX 5 I-Team investigation revealed how one police group misled the public for years, a list that included this television station.

A lot of counties put on a Shop With a Cop event. This investigation focused on the DeKalb County Fraternal Order of Police.

"Just put down here at the bottom Shop with A Cop," the man who looked like Santa Claus told an undercover FOX 5 I-Team producer. Joe Penn was getting a $100 donation for a program he said desperately needed help.

"It's a continual program," he told our producer as she wrote the check. "They continually get kids into DFACS and foster care. One hundred percent of the money that you donate goes to that program."

Wrong. What the people at the DeKalb Fraternal Order of Police didn't tell the public was their phone solicitors kept 25% of every donation they got. According the charity's 2013 tax return, the last reporting year available, they raised about $240,000. Of that, nearly $100,000 went into the pockets of the solicitors. And the remaining $140,000? The F-O-P says only $23,000 went to needy children.

Twice a year Gary Sanders said he gave $200 for Shop with a Cop, thinking all of his money went for disadvantaged kids in DeKalb County.

"I would consider it stealing," Sanders said after we told him less than 10 percent of the donations got spent on children. "You tell me you're going to put x amount of dollars that we're donating toward children and then a fraction of it goes? I'm going to say that's stealing."