If you spend any time in merchant cash advance broker communities right now, you'll notice the same argument playing out on repeat. Someone posts a version of the same warning: stop buying leads, almost all of them are garbage. The post gets dozens of comments. Half the room agrees enthusiastically. The other half (usually people who sell leads for a living) jump in to defend the practice, insisting that with the right dialer, the right follow-up cadence, and the right mindset, "aged" or resold leads can still get funded deals.
Both sides are sort of right. And that's exactly the problem.
The Core Complaint, Stripped of the Noise
The argument against buying leads usually comes down to a simple piece of logic: if someone had actually built a reliable way to generate consistent, high-intent MCA leads, why would they sell that system to you instead of running it themselves and keeping 100% of the funded revenue? A lead package costs a few thousand...