Cogent salespeople are the worst in the industry. If your contact information lands in their database, they'll never stop soliciting. At least once a year for the past 6 years Cogent calls my personal cell phone. This continues despite my repeated requests for them to stop calling and to remove me from their list.
For many of these sales orgs "remove me from your list" just means "flag my entry so that they'll endeavor to find the flimsiest excuse to call you again." DataDog's justification for "call me again after I told them to never call me again" was that an employee had made the mistake of giving them his information at a conference and was interested in using them for a personal project. So that justified them contacting me even after I told them to remove me from their list.
DataDog has the absolute pushiest sales folks I've ever dealt with.
I used to get daily calls from them and I'd tell them that we already had another monitoring solution and that they'll need to send me written material to present to my team if we were going to switch. They would always say sure, never do it and then call me again the next day.
I get spam near daily. I actually just got spam from a "new" cogent salesperson _as I was reading the ARIN pdf_. I've told them "don't contact me again" and it's a different person the next week.
It's absurd and I'm glad at least something is starting to be done.
The usual reaction in the US should be: sue them. You have the CAN-SPAM act and the Do Not Call Registry… why don't people make use of that to stop the companies from spamming them?
Maybe, but that only covers the court portion. The more problematic portion is gathering admissible evidence.
Also, it's not clear if small claims would have jurisdiction with companies that aren't in the same state.
Additionally, winning in small claims only gives you the right to chase after the award (the court is not going to collect on your behalf) -- so you still have to go to the time, hassle, and expense of trying to collect.
It is all about creating asymmetry into your favor i.e. make them waste their time.
Make them jump through a bazillion hoops. Their will bring their managers and directors involved. Make those waste their time as well. Have them write proposals. Get their bosses involved. Have their bosses waste their time. Eventually it would get to an SVP/EVP level of sales which will permanently fix the issue.
I was briefly listed as a contact for a network circa 2002, had the same issue.
They definitely keep you active, they probably successfully establish contact every 2-3 years, as I’m aggressive about not answering calls from numbers I don’t know.
