There are lots of Marketing companies that specialise in collecting data from multiple sources and matching that data to then sell the results.

This is what Zoominfo do.

You might assume that Zoominfo is part of Zoom – the video sharing service so popular during Lock down, but in fact Zoominfo existed years before Zoom came along. There is no connection.

At the radio  station, we have received dozens of emails from ZoomInfo telling us they are collating our data and plan to sell it. They do provide a way for us to opt out of this data selling.

We do not know the quality of the data they have collected, but the email addresses they used for each person at the radio station are fake. They simply guessed the first name of each person as being the first part of their email address. This is wrong so the many emails received are clearly fake.

How Zoominfo got so many names of the people at the radio station, we do not know unless they actually read our website.

We assume the quality of their data to be very poor, based on the fact that they simply invented email addresses for us. They also appear to think they are meeting legal requirements by offering us the chance to correct our data that they have. However, as the message has gone to fake email addresses, that didn’t work so well.

There seems to be little point in trying to correct the data they have as that will simply lead to more unwanted emails, so we’ll leave them to their ignorance.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.