Customer Feedback: CloudFlare Spamming Customers?

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Product improvement

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Customer Feedback: Cloudflare Spamming Customers?

Benefit

Hi, we have been a Cloudflare customer for many years, and still are. However, I am very concerned about a spamming incident initiated by the Cloudflare Business Development Team towards employees of our organisation.

On September 24, 2024, one of Cloudflare employees targeted a group of email addresses from our company to send a bogus marketing report claiming we were receiving irregular traffic to our web site.

The spam tactic resulted in employees contacting our IT group as they had no idea what this was about, but they were concerned by the false claim contained in the email saying the firewall detected irregular traffic and bad requests that could lead to DDoS attacks. This made our support group waste very precious time.

But here is where the incident hurts Cloudflare’s credibility:

  1. Following the incident, as the owner of our Cloudflare account, I contacted the Business Development Representative to complain about the situation. His reply said he “wasn’t sure whom to contact to share this report”. Since our organization is a Cloudflare customer, it must be crystal clear in your system who are the main contacts for our domain: me and someone from our accounting department. In other words, saying he didn’t know who to contact was a lie;

  2. The spam blast targeted employees that are not working in our IT and security group;

  3. Some of the emails were blocked by our antispam infrastructure because they were not even real addresses from our domain and not following our email address standard;

  4. If we were under serious attack, I know for a fact that we would not be contacted by Business Development representatives.

Bottom line, this is a cheap and badly setup promotion tactic built on top of a marketing tool such as Zoominfo (or equivalent) to supply email addresses and contacts.

Considering Cloudflare is a security company, I am extremely concerned that your organization uses such an unethical spam tactic. Espacially that Cloudflare’s core service is to block unwanted traffic and protect users and organizations!

Since Cloudflare’s “ambitious goal is to help build a better Internet”, I suggest you start internaly by fixing your marketing department.

Sincerely

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