Someone Tried to Sell Me a List of 2,600 Palmer Airshow Attendees. Here's Where It Actually Came From.

Monday morning I opened my FrostBoard inbox and found an email from someone named Josephine. She was offering me a list of 2,600 pre-registered attendees for the Great Alaska Aviation Gathering in Palmer on May 2 and 3. Names, verified email addresses, phone numbers, company information, the whole package. She said it was the official exhibitor outreach list. She wanted to sell it to me so I could "maximize my ROI" at the booth.

I run an Alaska marketplace. I was planning to exhibit at the airshow. On paper I am exactly who this email was written for.

The offer should have been tempting. Instead it smelled wrong.

What a Real Pre-Registration List Would Look Like

The Great Alaska Aviation Gathering is free to the public. The Alaska Airmen's Association runs it every year and they project more than 25,000 attendees across the two days. General admission does not require pre-registration. Nobody fills out a form to walk through the gates.

What does require registration is the narrow stuff: exhibitors, aircraft camping, the Show and Shine, static aircraft displays. Those registrations live on JotForm and TicketSpice, and the data sits with the event organizers. It is not scraped. It is not public. It is not for sale.

So when Josephine told me she had 2,600 "pre-registered attendees" I already knew the number was wrong. The real pre-registration pool is a few hundred people at most, and it is made up of exhibitors like me plus pilots signing up for camping and display slots. 2,600 is the wrong order of magnitude.

The number that IS around 2,600, though, is the number of active certificated pilots in Alaska.

Where the List Actually Came From

I had a research agent pull the math, and this is how it works.

The Federal Aviation Administration publishes two public databases. The Airmen Certification Releasable Database contains names, postal addresses, and certification details for every active pilot in the country. It is updated monthly and anybody can download it. The Releasable Aircraft Database does the same thing for every registered aircraft, including the owner's name and address.

According to the FAA's Active Pilots Summary from April 2026, there are 3,181 active certificated pilots with an Alaska address. Alaska also has 9,052 registered aircraft, which ranks the state sixth in the country for aircraft registrations. These are big numbers, and they are free to anybody who types the URL.

Here is what the FAA does not give you: email addresses or phone numbers. Both databases are postal only.

So data brokers take the FAA download, filter it by state, and run the names through consumer enrichment services like Acxiom, LexisNexis, or ZoomInfo. These services cross-reference the names against other public and commercial records to tack on email addresses and phone numbers. After enrichment and a little data loss, you end up with a list of roughly 2,600 Alaskan pilots with full contact info.

Then you email that list to every exhibitor at every major Alaska aviation event, dress it up as "pre-registered attendees," and charge a few thousand dollars for something that cost you nothing to build.

That is what I was being offered. A scraped, enriched version of a free public database with a fake story on top.

This Is Not New and It Is Not Only Alaska

This pattern shows up at every major trade show in the world. The Singapore Airshow organizers have issued formal warnings about scam emails claiming to sell visitor information. The American Academy of Ophthalmology publishes a standing consumer alert about "meeting list" attendee scams that target their annual conference. There is a well-known Reddit thread on r/tradeshows with the all-caps title "DON'T BUY THE ATTENDEE LIST!" that has been upvoted by event professionals for years.

The Federal Trade Commission treats unsolicited commercial email with deceptive content as a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Claiming a list is something it is not qualifies.

None of this is illegal in the sense that downloading the FAA database is illegal. It is not. The database is public. What crosses the line is the misrepresentation. Calling a scraped database an "exclusive attendee list" is a lie, and the lie is the product.

Why This Matters for the People in Palmer

Three groups get hurt by this.

Exhibitors lose real money. A typical attendee list solicitation runs a few thousand dollars, and the exhibitor thinks they are getting a warm lead pool. What they get is a cold outreach list that would have cost them nothing to assemble themselves. When the open rates are terrible and the replies do not come, they blame their own marketing instead of the broker who sold them bad data.

The event loses trust. When dozens of exhibitors receive an email with the event's name on it, some of them assume the Alaska Airmen's Association sold or leaked their information. The Association did neither. But the association has to spend energy answering questions and cleaning up confusion it did not cause.

The pilots and owners on the list get the worst of it. Their data is being sold to strangers without their consent. They are going to get cold-called and cold-emailed by whoever buys the list. And when they ask where the caller got their info, nobody can give them a straight answer because the broker's supply chain runs through four or five enrichment vendors most buyers cannot even name.

What To Do If You Got This Email

1. Do not buy it. The list is almost certainly a scraped and enriched public database, not an attendee registration export.
2. Check with the event organizer directly. The Alaska Airmen's Association is reachable through their official website. A two-minute email to them will confirm whether any list was actually released. In almost every case, it was not.
3. Report the solicitation. The Better Business Bureau Scam Tracker aggregates these reports by industry and region, and enough reports create a paper trail that can lead to action. The FTC also accepts reports through ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
4. Forward deceptive spam to the FTC. If the email was clearly misleading, forward it to spam@uce.gov, which is the FTC's spam reporting address under CAN-SPAM.
5. Delete it and move on. Do not reply. Do not negotiate. Do not ask them to remove you from their list, because that confirms your address is monitored and you will get three more emails next week.

How To Actually Reach Alaskan Pilots and Aircraft Owners

If you need to reach the Alaska aviation community for a real reason, you have options that do not involve buying scraped data.

Exhibit at the event. The Great Alaska Aviation Gathering will have more than 25,000 real Alaskans walking past your booth on May 2 and 3. I will be at the FrostBoard booth. The in-person conversations are worth more than a thousand cold emails.

Advertise in The Transponder. The Alaska Airmen's Association publishes a quarterly magazine that reaches their entire membership. That is legitimate paid access to the same audience the data broker claimed to be selling, except the Association actually runs it and the pilots actually consented.

Use the FAA data directly. You can download the same Airmen Certification Releasable Database the broker scraped. It is free. You will only get postal addresses, but that is enough for a direct-mail campaign, and postal mail to aviation professionals still has a higher response rate than cold email from a stranger.

Hire a reputable data compiler. If you need phone and email enrichment, companies like DataMasters and AmeriList specialize in aviation data, disclose their methodology, and comply with data privacy regulations. They are more expensive than a random email from Josephine, and that is because they are actually doing the work honestly.

The Bigger Picture

This whole thing connects to why I am building FrostBoard. The platforms Alaskans use to buy and sell have spent twenty years letting anybody claim to be anybody. Data brokers scrape public records and sell them back as exclusive leads. Puppy listings take money for dogs that do not exist. Facebook Marketplace sellers vanish between the down payment and the delivery. Alaska List has not been updated since 2008.

FrostBoard is built on the opposite idea. Every seller is ID verified. Every transaction has a real name attached to it. Every reputation follows the person who earned it. You cannot scrape the FrostBoard user base and resell it, because we do not sell our data and we do not let anyone else either. If you want to reach Alaskan aircraft owners through FrostBoard, you list what you are selling, you verify who you are, and the people who want what you have come find you. That is it.

The platforms failed you. Not the other way around.

The Great Alaska Aviation Gathering is May 2 and 3 at the Palmer airport. The Alaska Airmen's Association puts it on, and if you are going, come find the FrostBoard booth. I will be there both days. I will be the one not carrying a scraped database.

It starts with you.