Broker check
Is Apollo.io legit and safe?
Reviewed August 1, 2026
Short answer
Apollo.io is a legitimate sales-intelligence company, and it also lost control of its contact database: in 2018 a researcher found roughly 200 million contact records sitting in an unsecured store, exposed for months. The company is real, the product works, and its security history is part of the honest answer.
| Type of site | B2B contact databases |
|---|---|
| Cost to remove yourself | Free |
| Time to submit the request | 5 minutes |
| Account required | No |
| Typical time to disappear | varies |
| Enforcement actions we found | 1 documented - see the public record below |
Is Apollo.io a scam?
No. It sells a working sales tool. The grievance most people have is that a profile of their working life exists because a colleague synced an address book, not because anyone defrauded them.
What Apollo.io actually is
A B2B sales-intelligence platform pairing names with employers, job titles, work email addresses and phone numbers, sold as subscription access to sales teams.
Where Apollo.io gets your data
Contact data contributed by its own users through synced address books, plus public web sources and commercial datasets.
Is it legal?
Not a consumer reporting agency, and its records are not intended for FCRA-regulated decisions. Its data is business-contact information, which most US privacy law treats more permissively than consumer data.
What Apollo.io exposes about you
- Full name and job title
- Employer
- Work email address
- Phone numbers
- LinkedIn profile link
The real risks
- The 2018 exposure shows that aggregated business-contact data is itself a breach target.
- A work email paired with employer and title is what makes targeted phishing credible.
- Removal is keyed to a work email address, so a request from a personal address often finds nothing.
- Records rebuild whenever another user syncs a contact list containing you.
Apollo.io's public record
2018
Security researcher Vinny Troia found an Apollo database of roughly 200 million contact records accessible without authentication, and the company subsequently notified customers of the breach. Reporting put the exposure at over 200 million contact listings, sitting open for a period of months before it was surfaced.
TechCrunch, October 2018 (Apollo contacts database breach)What to do about it
You can remove yourself for free, and you do not need a reason. Our step-by-step Apollo.io opt-out guide covers the current process - about 5 minutes, no payment, and no account needed in most cases. Expect to repeat it every few months, because these listings rebuild from public records. If you would rather see which sites list you before starting, the free exposure scan checks the major brokers, known breaches, and public profiles tied to your username without storing anything.
California residents have a stronger option: the state's free DROP platform sends a single binding deletion request to every registered data broker. Everyone else can see what your state allows.