Any decent internal recruiter has an agreement that if they reached out to you, even if you bypassed them to contact the company, they get credit. And you are probably being contacted through a CRM that automates it for them.
I'd love to see how this is written into the contract. I've worked on the company side with a lot of contingency recruiters and the wording is never broad enough to cover "we talked to them but didn't actually send them to you".