My boss paid for contacts from a lead generation company. Said company provided us with a bunch of names and phone numbers, and said they had called to make sure the clients were interested before providing us the list.
When I called, I would get told off and the prospective clients would tell me they had never heard of us and didn't get any calls prior. I reported this to my boss. He went back to the leads company with this and they told him "oh, we definitely called these people" and that was good enough for my boss.
Thank God he scrapped that lead generation plan. I don't know how much he paid the lead generation company, but I'd wager they wrote a web scraper for school and ISP contacts and just sent him that list.