cogent spamming directly from ARIN records?

Wed Oct 4 19:07:40 UTC 2023

Based on my personal experience of getting onto the contact list of an
extremely persistent Cogent sales person, mostly, I am morbidly curious
what their CRM system looks like for cold and stale leads, and how often
these sets of non-responsive leads get passed on to new junior salespeople.
And exactly how many of those sales people there are and what
policies/management structure they work under.

It took a fair amount of effort and many strongly worded responses on my
part to eventually get my personal cellular phone number removed from their
CRM system (or at least marked as a do-not-contact).

On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 6:52 PM Mel Beckman <mel at beckman.org> wrote:

> This morning I received an email from someone at Cogent asking about an
> ASN I administer. They didn’t give any details, but I assumed it might be
> related to some kind of network transport issue. I replied cordially,
> asking them what they needed. The person then replied with a blatant spam,
> advertising Cogent IP services, in violation of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act’s
> prohibition against deceptive UCE.
>
> I believe they got the contact information from ARIN, because the ARIN
> technical POC is the only place where my name and the ASN are connected. I
> believe this is a violation of Cogent’s contract with ARIN. Does anybody
> know how I can effectively report this to ARIN? If we can’t even police
> infrastructure providers for spamming, LIOAWKI.
>
>  -mel beckman
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