You need to do more than "peek at" the real data, at least if you are buying a business for actual revenue and not for it's potential as an idea.
You need to follow at least some threads all the way down to the ground truth.
First, ask for 20 references of successful happy customers, talk to all of them, and do some verification. 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.
Yes, this would take a week for a handful of interns/junior employees and one senior staffer. But you are about to invest $175 million. It is worth a bit of actual effort, not just a bunch of handwaving over expensed dinners.
This should be a career-ending move for anyone involved at Chase.
> 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.
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.
When I say real data I mean data that was not handed to you by people who have 175 million reasons to fake it. Like another commenter added try to talk to some of their customers, in this case even trying to email them seems like it would have been enough.
reply