Just to help others out here.
@Jamie_Grove @MJComputerGeek @elizaRAFTP @sassybadge @capecalikim
I too was hit with hundreds of abandoned carts almost overnight from “James James”
After investigations and reaching out to visitors who have been taking advantage of this I have intelligence to suggest this is what’s happening:
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There’re “FREE PRODUCT” discords set up, which use bots to scan Shopify stores en-mass for free products denoted by any product with $0.00.
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Test orders attempts then placed by the bot which has the default James James and associated address details stored within it.
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From the order attempts confirming free products are available they are then categorised and listed within the Discord servers/chats as links to the free products whereby members of said discord community can browse the various industry ‘categories’ to find “free” products they’re interested in.
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Whilst some of these discord members are just interested in legitimately free products I suspect the bots and service users are also trying to capitalize on $0.00 product listing errors by site admins in the hope to grab a valuable “free” product.
I’ve coded some additional bits to prevent this on my own site but I won’t detail here to avoid giving info anywhere for bots to update. + My setup case will be different to other stores.
But I thought I’d post the above here so people have more of an understanding about why this is happening.