ProspectDB, Inc.

InterWorking Labs (
) contracted with ProspectDB to supply leads for a telemarketing campaign. ProspectDB was late on delivering the leads so we had contract workers sitting around with nothing to do and we were paying them! When ProspectDB finally provided the leads, it turned out that 60% of them had bad email addresses and/​or bad phone numbers. The normal rate of bad leads is 5%, so the performance of ProspectDB was 12 times worse than the industry average. When we alerted ProspectDB to their failure to perform according to their contract, they became very defensive and insisted that we needed to document each and every bad lead with explicit explanations as to the failure. We documented all the bad email addresses. When we started the follow up phone calls and found that 60% of the phone numbers were bad, after contacting the first 100 leads, we simply stopped, as what was the point of this exercise in extensive documentation? It was a waste of time for our staff. Of course, one normally provides this documentation, when the failures are only 5%, but at 60%, it is ridiculous and our staff time would exceed the cost of the purchase of the database. Think about it. If you ordered 1,000 shovels, and found that of the first 100 that you tried, 60 of them were defective shovels, wouldn’t you just reject the balance of the shipment? Of course you would. Prospect DB is trying to transfer the work of cleaning up their database to their customers, and then charging them for the privilege. I think this is a form of racketeering and the Orange County District Attorney should investigate.