Spam bots targeting e-commerce/dropshippinh ads on Meta

I recently saw a pretty good ad for a cat toy and actually found myself watching a lot of the video ad. I don’t even own a cat! To be honest I thought it was a proper brand because the logo etc looked very professional and the ad made it seem that they had designed and manufactured the product. It was also something new that I’d never seen before.

However, a quick search on aliexpress had their $29.95 product listed for around $8 including shipping. I was kinda impressed! Here was someone who had actually solved the dropshipping challenge and found a low cost item with high perceived value. Then they went to the effort of making a nice looking site and paying for ads that were actually really well done.

I was going to keep the link to share with people in the dropshipping sub as a good example of how to start out in ecom using dropshipping first to test a product/market.

After looking at the ad and website I went back to the ad and saw that it had hundreds of interactions, which suggested that the ad had been successful and been running for a while.

Then I went to the ad comments and it was a long stream of bot comments, all with a variation of ‘I bought this product much cheaper from (insert shitty low effort drop shipping store here)’

There must have been around 10 different bot accounts all sharing different stores that were selling the same aliexpesss product. The bots aren’t very elegant and the spam comments were repeated many times, and often had spelling or grammar errors.

Is this a new level of bullshit that we have to put up with on meta? We’re already annoyed constantly by scam bots pretending to be ‘Meta support’ or from an ‘agency’ that will help our business…

It looks like people are now finding ‘winning’ products and taking it one step further than the usual unethical ‘find a winning ad and copy the product’ routine that’s taught by many gurus. These assholes are taking it one step further now - they’re not only stealing someone’s hard work, they’re now sabotaging the site that they’ve copied…

So these scammers get a great product to copy and then hijack paid ads for free traffic. I’m surprised that the advertiser left the comments under the ad - some of them were over a week old. I don’t want to seem like I’m targeting one group but all of the spam bot names seemed to be Indian or Bangladesh in origin.

Anyone else seen this or been targeted by it?