You hear stories about how these lists don’t convert, how they’re full of fake addresses, or how they damage your reputation. That’s all true, but there’s another side to the story that’s even more serious. It’s not just about poor results, it’s about legality. Depending on where you and your subscribers are located, buying emails can cross over from being a bad business move into breaking the law.

In Europe, the GDPR changed the way businesses are allowed to handle personal data. Under this regulation, consent is the key. A person has to give you explicit permission to email them. If you buy a list, you don’t have that permission, which means sending a single campaign to those addresses could already put you in violation. The penalties aren’t small either, fines can reach into the millions, and authorities have shown they’re willing to enforce them.

In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act sets a different but equally important standard. While it doesn’t require prior consent in the same way GDPR does, it does require that every recipient can opt out easily and that you clearly identify your message as a commercial email. The catch is that with a bought list, you don’t know the origin of the addresses, and you often can’t guarantee that your message will meet compliance. That makes every email you send a gamble.

Other countries have their own versions too. Canada’s CASL is even stricter than the U.S. rules, and many regions in Asia and Latin America are putting laws in place to protect consumers from unsolicited email. The trend is clear: laws are leaning toward the side of the consumer, not the marketer, and relying on purchased emails is like walking through a legal minefield.

What makes this all worse is that buying emails isn’t just risky for you, it also supports the people who built an industry around harvesting and selling personal data without consent. In many cases, those addresses were scraped or stolen, and by buying them you’re indirectly funding practices that lawmakers are actively fighting against.

So the question isn’t just whether buying emails works, it’s whether you can afford the risk. Real, permission-based marketing may take longer, but it keeps you safe legally, builds trust, and puts you on the right side of the law. At the end of the day, the law is clear: