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? 

[Jon_Marsh]

Hey Shopify, How about some answers or help on this situation?  It's clearly affecting hundreds of your customers and now the first thing that comes up when you google Mark Mustermann is "Mark Mustermann Shopify".

I have 2 stores and my other store just got hit with 50 new profiles, abandoned carts, email additions and google hits, many of these I pay for with my advertising and email programs.  For a small sight like mine 50 hits and abandoned carts throws off al my data and requires lots of work on our end to edit and adjust or accounts.   

Where the support from Shopify who we are all paying to provide the pklatform and it's obviously a huge vulnerability for your customers!

[hopeford]

100% agree.

[BareWithItLLC]

Whatever y'all did over a month ago to "fix the problem" didn't work. I had 49 Mark Mustermann abandoned carts. I have an address for "him" in NYC. should we send him a 5 lb. bucket of gorilla crap? 

[HeyLola]

I am getting registrations from a Mark Mustermann on my website too.  The first batch were created 24 days ago and now I see some that were 7 days.  Can you let me know when you find out who this is?  I hate to delete a customer but this looks suspicious.  

[ECanady]

This Mark Musterman has abandoned his cart 97 times this is not right! My store is yet to be successful with any sell to for like 8 months or more! False hope is an awful feeling. I just hope he can’t commit some type of fraud. 97 times in 30 days is overkill! 

 

[BedsbyTomorrow]

He did the same thing 42 times on my site.

[Sarah2891]

I also had Mark Mustermann add 49 times in 8 minutes span on Saturday between 5:49 pm and 5:57 pm. All of which 'started checkout' at least 1 time, some of them 2-3 times in a matter of a few minutes.

I checked all the addresses that were used for Markmustermann in all 8 profiles- and in ALL of those Cities / Addresses were in fact - GOOGLE OFFICE LOCATIONS!

On March 28th, John Smith from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (johnsmithstore.91@gmail.com) added his profile 8 times but all of them bounced. I thought my settings in Klaviyo were messed up, but support said they were correct and sometimes this happens (email bounces)

I thought the address he/it used looked familiar as I am very close to Kitchener, Ontario and I was correct... Its the Google Kitchener Building @ 

51 Breithaupt St
Kitchener, ON N2H 5G5

I hope this helps answer your question and/or confirm your suspicions! 

[Jmuliawan]

Has anyone solved this problem?? So frustated!

[hhildebrandt]

This just happened to me today as well under the same name. I do not have any paid ads, so no clue where he came from. He did not subscribe to any of my lists, just created 40-some abandoned carts in a 15 minute window. I have the spam filters checked as well. I am a relatively small business as it is, so don't even know how it found me.

I really hope this doesn't impact my store negatively. I've had to add so many 3rd party apps lately to resolve random issues like this, it's costing me so much money and slowing down my website.  Will stay tuned to this thread in hopes of another update from @Shopify 

[tennisracket]

I had roughly 10 times. Prior to this happening I had alerts on my phone asking for my amazon OTP but in Spanish. Has anyone else had issues anything else like that happen? I deleted all cards on file.  Has there been any serious flagging to shopify? 

[Rosemary1]

How do you delete these abandoned carts?  I contacted Shopify who told me all I could do is archive them.  It's cluttering up my abandoned carts and screwing up my stats.

[Jon_Marsh]

Yeah that’s another point of frustration, there is no ability to delete an abandoned cart, can’t see why this is not an option in Shopify

[DRuth]

Mark Musterman started again with 3 abandoned carts and I am sure msny more tonight! The asult has started again. Shopify needs to do something about this and stop this activity! This is maddening as I have to keep archiving

[SocialAutoPost]

As many people mentioned, it could be an account creation bot. It is a script (piece of code) that triggers registration form execution in loop (repeat action) until it gets blocked. To be more cautious you should implement one or more of these :

1. Add Google reCAPTCHA to your registration form
2. Secure your website with https (SSL)
3. Blacklist suspicious IPs
4. Validate email address while registration

Let me know if need more details on any of these.

[ButFirstFashion]

I replied earlier to Trevor but receivedno response. My spam protection is enabled and this still happened. Very frustrating!

[LATAY]

I’d like help on how to do these steps please. Info@laylaloou.com

[julie_theFolk]

Hi! How do you validate an email address during registration- is that a setting? Thanks!

[poppiwinkle]

This is such a good question! The emails used on my site were all like 123fake @ fake.com. Pretty easy to guard against.

[bodyandyou64]

48 Mark Mustermann today from different cities in usa.

If he'd only buy something I'd be a happy man lol

[metroretro]

So the assault on my shop has started again.  

And the spam protection has done little to nothing to prevent what can only be described as Tortious interference with our businesses and a violation of our corporative rights.

The lack of any true resolution exhibits a reckless indifference to the situation and an incredible fail on the part of this platform.

[Jenifer_Germer]

So it has started again today in my shop. I have done everything I can on my end as recommended by Shopify to protect myself from this. It has done no good. It is up to Shopify to do something about this!! There were over 23 accounts made today in Mustermann name. 

[redava]

It just started up again in my shop too. I had deleted all of them and now several new accounts are back again. So annoying.

[Yitsen]

I got 35 Mark Mustermann these days. Glad to know I am not alone.

It is indeed annoying and frustrating.

[LATAY]

I jut spent over an hour deleting email

sign up and customer files for

Mustermann. So frustrating I can’t block it. Today was the second time. 

[ChaleurM]

I’ve also had over 50 abandoned carts by the name Mark Mustermann (May 16 3 am).  I don’t have any ads running currently and really don’t know if it affects shop performance or is just annoying as heck. Each one is a different address and fakemail email.

[Sparki]

So what's the point of it?  how do you stop it from continuing?  shopify needs to supply some service here!!!!

[GROFUSA]

Happen to me, at least 200 Mark Mustermann, all with the same fake1234@fakemail.com only changing the numbers in the email.

[lmsburroughs]

This is happening to me too, so I'm just adding my comment here to find out if Shopify can resolve this for us somehow. 50 Mark Mustermanns created. This is the second time for us.

[MarkRippstein]

Jumping in to stay updated...

I've had this happening for a few months now with my clients...it's more than annoying, it's throwing off analytics and has started to impact our Klaviyo setups too (because of abandoned carts). Since Shopify/Google captcha is setup, I can only guess that this bot is part of Shopify...some sort of service to make sure things are working in some capacity. It needs to stop or at least change its name to be more transparent (and ideally reduce its impact on analytics across platforms).

[Redi-Fest]

Hello, Mark Musterman shows all their addresses as Google Office Buildings.

[ahuffmeyer]

Does any one use Google ads? I think this is a google ads bot as I only see this when I run google ads. Please confirm, maybe we can get our $$ back from google ads.

[redava]

I get these emails too, and I'm not running Google ads.

[bindaas]

So, what is the fix?

Any idea anyone?

[hemgren]

How has this gone on for this long without anything solved? It is unacceptable. Do we need to make more noise to be heard? If I get one more suggestion that I should pay for an app that doesn't even solve the issue I am leaving Shopify for good

[poppiwinkle]

He's still at it. I have over 50 Mark Mustermann's on my shopify site. The emails are like 123fake@fake.com - so no one is even trying to be slick about it.

[shoeangle]

Today July 19th 2022 we had 50 Mark Musterman. All with different locations(states, cities) all email addresses were fake with a number @ fakemail dot com. The only thing we can do is remove from our customer list. Not sure if this is a bot or not. 

[LowkeyLoki]

I got hit with the infamous Mark Musterman abandoned carts too... Several dozen. Fake emails and various locations across the USA. Pretty annoying that Shopify isn't working with Google to resolve the way this affects our reporting. As a new seller -and- current Google Data Analytics Certification student I'm pretty disappointed that I won't be able to use reporting from my new shop for my projects/portfolio. Devs do something lol

[RandomActsofArt]

Another thing to keep an eye on, if you use an outside email newsletter service that communicates with Shopify (like Constant Contact) don't just delete the accounts on Shopify. Go check your email service too. Deleting the Mark Mustermann accounts on Shopify didn't delete them on Constant Contact. There were enough email addresses on my CC to bump my contact numbers up enough to raise my bill $240 a year. 

[poppiwinkle]

Oh, wow, thanks for this info!

[Vanderhyden24]

This person keeps doing the same thing on our website too! I think all of us merchants who are affected by this Mark Musterman or John Smith should all form one body and legally take action against this person. They need to be taught a lesson because, they not stopping and no matter how you try to get rid of this person they finding ways to keep making these dummy checkouts.