Cognism — the premium supplier of spam and fake data
Cognism markets themselves as “Leaders in Premium Sales Intelligence”. However, reports find this this statement very misleading.
Furthermore, their “About our data”-section reads:
Cognism is a B2B lead generation, outbound automation and data processing service. We maintain a database of 5.6 billion data points, including 400 million business profiles and 10 million companies. This unique data asset provides B2B organisations with a GDPR compliant way of prospecting leads and enriching data.
This doesn’t seem to be true, as most of their data is fake. And furthermore — neither their data not the company itself is GDPR compliant.
Cognisms’ data is not GDPR compliant
Multiple people has reported that their data has ended up in their database without their consent, and that multiple attempts to get their data removed from their database has resulted in no response at all.
According to article 17 in the GDPR everyone has the right to be deleted from a database upon request. They also have the right to retrieve a copy of the data that is being processed.
However, even with more than 20 (!) such requests and more than 4 weeks of waiting, Cognism has yet to handle the deletion requests nor been able to answer on where they fetch their data.
With the GDPR, companies such as Cognism aren’t even able to process your data without your consent, this however is something Cognism gets around with using fake data.
Cognism delivers fake and invalid data
The major concern however, especially for their paying customers, are that most of they data is completely fake and/or invalid.
For some or most of their data they first generate fake data for domain by a random name generator. With a simple list of names and a target domain, they generate massive sets of e-mail adresses.
jeff@yourdomain.com
jenna@yourdomain.com
hannah@yourdomain.com
…
etc.
And sadly, this is their product. That they charge for — to emphasis; they charge for randomly generated data. You should not pay for their product.
SPAM and Cognism
This fake data leads to major other implications further down the line, both for themselves, and also for their paying customers.
Sending large amount of e-mails to non-existing domains may harm your sending reputation (a score an e-mail provider such as Microsoft or Google sets for your sending domain) massive, in the end your campaign will automatically end up as spam and even be rejected out right.
They themselves even encounter this as for whatever reason they have chosen to send out massive amounts of e-mails — even to their randomly generated adresses — informing the “person” that they exist in their records, that Cognism processes their personal (!) data.
Example of such an e-mail:
Have you received an e-mail with the subject line “Notice of Data Processing. This is not an advertisement.” from Cognism? Get in touch with them directly and request that they delete your data. Leave a comment if the request (surprisingly) is successful.
However, in one such example they sent out over 250 e-mails to the same person (but with a unique randomly generated name in name). A guess is that this is so enable them to tout that they are “GDPR compliant”.
The company
Sadly, Cognism seems to be attracting customers that doesn’t get what they are paying for — and in the UK they even seem to have been awarded some awards — awards that they probably shouldn’t have gotten if they knew what the company was up to.
Is Cognism operating on a scam? Some people think so, but that’s up to you to decide.
”Why this post?” You might wonder. For the past month or two I have literally been harassed my Cognism with almost 300 e-mails directed towards me. I’ve made more than 30 attempts to get them to clear my data and answer to how and why they are holding my data. I’ve yet to receive a single reply.
