Who Leaked My Contact Details?

In the last update, I told you that we got our company MicroStartup Venture Studio incorporated. We have a relationship with HDFC bank already and we have started the process of opening a current account.

During the incorporation process, I do not remember consenting to share my number and email ID with other businesses who want to sell their products or services to me. Maybe it’s there in the terms and conditions of something that I agreed to online. But there was no explicit permission given.

While many banks have tried emailing me and calling me randomly throughout the day to sell me an account, the biggest spammer of them all was Kotak Mahindra Bank. What you see in the screenshot below is not all the emails from Kotak. Just some of them. My inbox is clogged with these emails.

This kind of marketing practice goes on in India because no one calls them out and there are no laws governing it. How can a new entrepreneur grow his/her business if they get 3-5 calls a day (sometimes more) from other businesses trying to sell to them? As if the compliance requirements are not enough to distract from our core business of creating value.

Who made the director’s contact details public in the first place? Just because someone opens a new company doesn’t mean that their contact details should be published in public to the world.

On top of this, there is no way to determine where these details are published. Are we allowed to take the same data and use it for sales and marketing? There is no clear answer. In that case, the people who have access to such a database of newly registered companies have an unfair advantage over other companies. Shouldn’t there be a level playing field for this?

Do you have any idea about this? CAs might have an answer. Is this how things are? Reply to this post and let me know.