They had contacted a company I had worked for asking them to purchase a license, because apparently somewhere in the company some dev workflow had contacted the conda servers regularly. We never ended up tracing it down as it stopped some weeks before them contacting us, according to our network logs.

In general, you don't resort to such sales tactics unless there is good cause (significant usage, where you as unpaid vendor also have leverage) or you just end up burning potential future customers (as was the case here, as they chose a bad contact point inside the company).