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> Then demand to see all the "real" data and select a random sample of 50 emails and track them all down to real people (or not), and ask the people at those endpoints what is going on

Apart from the privacy/compliance/legal reasons that make this very difficult. A very low proportion of 50 real paying corporate customers are likely to respond to an email from a seemingly random source, change that to 50 students you’d hardly get any.

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Not to mention, if you really did have a mailing list that was effectively worth $175m, why would you give the whole thing to anybody before you get paid?

For sure, you do NOT give them the whole thing. You let a (presumably skilled) data analyst run a few queries. Letting out 100 or even 1000 names/profiles out of 4 million is effectively commercially worthless beyond verification.

Even if you don't get responses & interviews, you can also use the profiles to do verification - just find correlated data in the wild showing that these people exist -or don't. Check the physical addresses - is the same family name resident? Check school records, does the student exist? Etc. Etc. Etc. Sure, you'll find a few failures, but when they all turn uo bad, you will have saved your team $175 million - worth a weeks effort.

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