Is Mark Mustermann increasing my Google Ads cost with multiple accounts?

[LJ51]

This person made 79 accounts on my site, each from a different location. Anyone have any ideas? Is this going to raise my google ads amount? Is this person just doing this so my google amount goes up so I have to pay more? I don't understand, is it a bot? 

[ButFirstFashion]

Thank you! I already deleted the gazillion customer accounts it created but the abandoned carts are still there with blank customer info. I will try your suggestion on my laptop. 🙏🏽

[GinaPaeth]

Curious if you were able to delete the actual abandoned cart. I went into customer >last 30 days of abandoned cart and it worked to delete in that area but not in the actual abandoned cart area.  Any success?

[ButFirstFashion]

I was not able to delete the abandoned transactions using those instructions. Shopify should really find a way to stop this from happening.  It's ridiculous!

[hopeford]

Not yet.Will be in touch

[GinaPaeth]

DRuth,

I followed your instructions and yes it deleted what you said but it did not delete the transaction in abandoned carts unfortunately.  It deleted the customer, not the transaction.  If you find a way to delete the transaction itself in the abandoned cart, please let me know.

[hopeford]

DRuth, I check and I have the same issue. I will let you know when I find a
way to do so

[ButFirstFashion]

I said I deleted the customer accounts that were created, not abandoned carts. Someone posted just below that you can delete abandoned carts from the last 30 days. I haven't tried that yet. 

[SlightlyUnfiltr]

I delete the contacts. --
*Cheers!*
Desiree Wolfe

Email: desiree@desireewolfe.com
Message Line: ‪702.919.0526‬

[sioncruz]

Happened to us too. I have like 10 abandoned checkouts from that person with the same fake email and Googleplex number. This will mess up our analytics

[Janit_Calvo]

Just wanted to note - I didn't have any abandoned carts, I just had the 54 fake accounts with different cities/states. I don't do any paid search ads and no Googleplex either. 

Not sure if there a correlation but thought to mention...

[Lynnee62]

Like you I’ve had no orders or abandoned carts under this name, and don’t use Google Ads. It’s over 50 a day now and it just messes with data.

[Gina1682]

Thank you Janit_Calvo. It's just odd that this bot is finding us all and creating fake accounts and abandoned checkouts. I had 50 I deleted today and saw all the emails bounced since they were also fake.  

[AlphaDiosa]

I checked a few of the addresses. The majority of them are Google locations across the country. Nothing to help solve the problem, but an interesting tidbit of information. 

[Teetot]

If it has to do with google, we have a google shopping promotion account.  Curious - does the number of Mark Musterman's match the number of items in your store?  It may be the bot that tests each item for validity before they serve the ads.  But I counted mine and it's way more than the number of products I have.  BUT if you add up the number of variants it seems there is a Mark for EVERY VARIANT.  So I think I just solved it.   Check your number of marks and number of variants.

[Gina1682]

Oh you might be! I do have a Google Shopping channel. I also just added this to my store a few days ago. 

[SMort]

Yep, just had 50 Mark Mustermann's from all over the country abandon 50 carts between 6:19PM and 6:23PM tonight! This has to be a google bot

[Megan_Kothari]

omg same. he abandoned 72 carts in one day

[fmwebs]

Mark Mustermann fake37017@fakemail.com

[NickVA]

yes looks like this "person" is still pretty active - has made 50 plus attempts today and around 30 plus each day for the past few weeks of and on ...... can someone explain  - is this someone trying to hack my shop  / steal my work (screengrab) ETC 

[MyCoast2Coast]

This has happened to me as well. I am glad I found this thread.

[Costa2]

Mark Mustermans created 34 abandoned checkouts on my Shopify site. They all were done in 10 minutes a couple days ago. Haven't seen any since. My guess is that Shopify flagged the IP and stopped it.
I think it's ridiculous that Shopify doesn't let you delete abandoned checkouts so I'm stuck with them. I guess it's not that bad but annoying to see when I see that page.
Support looked into it and suggested some apps but non of them would prevent abandoned checkouts so the suggestions didn't solve my problem. If they are blocking attacks in the back end, that's good enough. But I really would like to delete this crap from my list.

[Creteandwax]

Same. They added 100 accounts to my site. How to make it stop?

[UnKatchable]

Through process of elimination - how many of us have a pop up email sign up that comes up within 30 seconds on our site? I have two stores. One is on google and google shopping, the other is not. The one on google is getting the daily 50 hits and the Mark Mustermann accounts added. Every day between 3-6pm est there are 25 hits to my site, and 3-5am est the other 25 come through. It doesn't even page jump, it literally hits one landing page, then like a new person or bot hits another, and another. The first time my stats shot through the roof it did create 50 accounts in 50 different US cities using fakemail(random numbers)@gmail.com. Only one subscribed to my email list and it was the first one. I'm not buying that Shopify has no idea who this is. They have a huge back office IT, they can trace the IP, they can contact google to see if it's them. Seeing this has been going on for how many months now? This thread started in Dec of 2021. 

[Vanderhyden24]

The same thing keeps happening with us I reported this to Google Ads because, I suspect this Mark Musterman is invalidly clicking our ads as well 

[tennisracket]

Good idea! We should all do this, and to Facebook ads too --
[image: facebook] <>
[image: instagram] <>
Tessa Sechay

CEO Founder

West Label Hair Extensions

Pure Remy Hair
7789528817
info@westlabelhair.com
www.westlabelhair.com

[ButFirstFashion]

This just happened to me this morning. 50+ Mark Mustermann accounts created with fake addresses and emails. Not only did this bot or whatever it is create accounts, it added to cart which created 50+ abandoned carts. My recovered abandoned cart rate was pretty decent. This just trashed it. I am livid! Deleted all of the accounts so that I don't waste money emailing them. I wish I could block so that this doesn't happen again. Normal when I see an unusually high number of visitors at one time, those bot visitors don't count as sessions. This time it did. Very odd. 

[hopeford]

The sad part about this is that Shopify do not have a solution.
Their best op is to refer one to app. The more apps ,the better the kickup
,I suppose

[DRuth]

We had this happen to us as well, Mark Musterman so many accounts and all different states! 

[SlightlyUnfiltr]

I've had this same issue. I am using Automizely for my pop-up form so I thought it was them. I've been deleting the contacts since I don't want it to count against my email count for my newsletter. 

Using Crave theme. I do have a google listing. I was using Mailchimp connected to my forms but I have since deleted them.

[Saiprasad491]

It happened to us today! 85+ accounts created for this person.  This is really frustrating

[bic2LL]

I got the same exact person do the same thing to my account.

[Costa2]

It would be nice to hear from Shopify on this thread telling us that they plan on adding a delete function on the abandoned checkouts page. It's such a simple function. Doesn't not have to be right away but would be nice to clear out this garbage at some point.

[Costa2]

I'm guessing that Shopify thinks that this is a complicated fix because it would require clearing the customers shopping carts on their browser, as part of the delete function. That's not necessary. All they have to do is make it so that you can remove it from being seen as a shop admin. It would be removed from the abandoned check out screen. This would also remove that customer from being notified which is also good.

[hopeford]

This is a notice from Shopify. Apparently it takes about 10 days to delete the customer's personal information. There is no mention of deleting the item in the cart. The attached link might answer  some your questions.

Erasure request submitted

This customer's personal information will be erased from your store on May 9, 2022.

Learn about the process of erasure requests.

[Sarahtd]

Frustrating.  I just found this thread after posting about this. Ridiculous ... 

[md1231]

Same issue here. Has anyone figured this out?

[Jenifer_Germer]

Same thing happened to me. He came back 2 different days and both days made over 20 accounts. All of them used different fake mail accounts

[Jenifer_Germer]

 

[GinaPaeth]

Seems as though this has been slowing down traffic to my store as well.   Shopify please step in and deal with this. 

[metroretro]

I'm more confused now than ever.

Since Shopify has no vacation mode, I had to password protect my shop while my desktop was being repaired.  During that time, I received a Page Indexing alert from Google, with a soft 404 error message.

Once I reopened my shop, I clicked on the 'fix' link in that google email, and then immediately after received the first 50 abandoned carts by Mustermann.

Afterwards, I received an A-OK from Google, letting me know that everything was fixed.  I assumed that this was the end of it -- yet I've received 100s more of the abandoned carts, my bounce rate is at an all-time high, and sales have tanked and currently non-existent.

If this is a google bot, what is the purpose?  Why would google want to cause this disruption and tank visibility?

All I can do is archive the abandoned carts, and cannot find an option to delete them.  So far, things have not improved.

[GinaPaeth]

I just called shopify support. I let them know our frustration about this and how we need to have control to delete abandoned carts.  Of course they recommended an app for 2.99 a month (blocky), are you surprised? So very frustrating to have to buy another app that the shopify store should be able to do on its own.  Please make your voice be heard about this being a need in our stores.  

[Vanderhyden24]

It is indeed annoying for us merchants to be going through this I wonder why this person impersonating under Google what is the connection and why are they harassing Shopify merchants? 

[WaxMelrose]

This happened to us last week- 100+ abandoned checkouts from Mark Musterman. V Annoying.

[Jon_Marsh]

Hey Shopify any chance of getting some help with all of these custoemrs haveing this issue?

I've got nearly 100 new customer accounts and abandoned carts and shopify will not let me delet them

[Weir]

just happened in May to me and I found today. Sales are slow and this is concerning

[Trevor]

Hello, everyone. 

Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns and feedback surrounding the issue of the bot activity that has created several accounts and/or abandoned carts under the name of “Mark Mustermann” in your stores. 

Thanks to the feedback, our developers have begun working on a means of preventing these bot signups.

In the meantime, you can consider enabling spam protection in your admin. 

1. Log in to your Shopify admin 
2. Go to the Online store
3. Click Preferences 
4. Confirm that the spam protection has settings to enable spam protection for: 

1. Customer account creation/login/password reset

2. Newsletter email address entry + blog comment entry

You may also consider using an app from the Shopify App Store that is designed to help mitigate bot activity. 

We will provide you with an update in this thread once more information becomes available. 

[ButFirstFashion]

Hi Trevor,

My spam protection is enabled and this still happened. Very frustrating! Thank you for looking into it. 

Off topic but I'm also having issues with Facebook/Instagram checkout orders not syncing. Just realized that this week after several customers complained of order delays. All of their orders came over from Facebook but not as paid orders. They are showing up as abandoned carts but Facebook has them all pending, credit card authorized and awaiting shipment. It's a nightmare. 😢

[Vanderhyden24]

Mine is also on but, they still keep signing up with the fake accounts what will Shopify say about that?

[Jenifer_Germer]

This does not work as both Spam protection boxes have always been checked and it still happens to me.

[Rigpacks]

I think it's in bad taste to keep pushing your company's apps when literally every customer in this forum is saying that spam protection should be included in the (already steep) price of Shopify. I know its your job to push what they want you to push, but please take this cue to let them know how the community feels. It's really hard to watch a company slowly turning into spirit airlines trying to figure out all the different ways they can squeeze money out of the people that use their service. Why make using this service such a burden on the people that use it? Tell whomever you need to tell that people are saying this shit is getting ridiculous and every one of their customers is just waiting for a better option to come along so they can dump Shopify. Ive only been using it for a few months and the amount of silly stuff just keeps piling up. Can't wait for the competition to take over!