One minute your ad is crushing it. Sales are rolling in, your cost per lead is looking beautiful, and you’ve got something that just… works.
Then someone copies it. Not loosely. Not “inspired by.” Word for word, scene for scene, same fonts, same colours, same structure — with just enough tweaks to make them feel like they can plead ignorance.
That’s exactly what happened to me recently. And because I know I am absolutely not alone in this, I want to walk you through what I did about it, what worked, what didn’t, and where I landed.
This Wasn’t My First Rodeo (Just My First Time on This Side of It)
Before I get into the copying incident itself, there’s a bit of backstory that actually shaped how I handled the whole thing.
About five years ago, I was on the receiving end of a terrifying legal letter from a competitor in the US. They accused me of stealing the contents of their course and selling it as my own. Which was completely, fundamentally untrue.
But that didn’t stop it from spiralling into months of back-and-forth, thousands of dollars in legal fees, and more sleepless nights than I care to count. The whole thing eventually came down to a single word — a standard marketing term they had trademarked — that appeared in one of my ad captions.
One word. One DM could have sorted it out in seconds.
That experience scarred me a little. But it also gave me a very clear lens for how to handle things when the tables turned.
What Actually Happened
I run a highly specific, well-performing ad for one of my AI-based content creation products. It’s been running successfully for a while. I put real thought and creative energy into it.
Then I started seeing another ad getting served to me repeatedly. Same hook. Same wording (with one or two words swapped). Near-identical fonts, colours, layout, and B-roll style. The same structure, scene by scene. Even specific phrases from my ad appeared almost verbatim in theirs.
The person behind it? A large account. 156,000 followers. Multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue from low-ticket offers, by their own admission.
This wasn’t a newbie accidentally getting too close to the line. And it wasn’t just an integrity issue (though it absolutely was that too). It was a direct business problem. We had similar products, similar audiences, and almost identical ad creative running at the same time. My once-high-performing ad started declining right around the date their campaign launched. When I checked the Meta Ads Library, I could see they had 20 variations of essentially the same copied content running simultaneously. They were going heavy.
So I had to do something.
The Three Levers You Have (And How I Used Each One)
1. Reach out directly first.
Because I’d been on the other side of this, my first move was to give them the benefit of the doubt. I sent a DM and an email — friendly, clear, and specific. I outlined exactly which elements of my ad had been copied, explained the impact it was having, and gave them a 48-hour deadline to take it down.
They played dumb. Asked me to clarify which ad I meant. Then denied it entirely.
So I put together a PDF — screenshots of my ad and their ad side by side, section by section, with timestamps from the Ads Library showing mine launched in December and theirs in March. I sent it back with a 24-hour deadline and a clear list of the specific elements that needed to be removed.
They blocked me and eventually took down that specific ad… then relaunched eight new versions of it, marginally different.
2. Use the official platform channels.
Most platforms have more than a “report” button when it comes to IP infringement. Meta has an actual IP infringement department — you can find it by searching “Meta IP infringement” and submitting a formal report. I submitted one for Facebook and one for Instagram. One was approved, one was denied (it comes down to who reviews it). By that point the original ad had already been deactivated, so it didn’t change the immediate outcome — but it’s absolutely worth doing and creates a paper trail.
3. Decide whether to go public.
This is the most personal call of the three. And the one I thought about the longest.
The internet loves a public callout. The content would likely go viral. But that’s not the kind of attention I wanted, and it’s not the kind of energy I wanted to bring. At the same time, doing nothing didn’t feel right either — especially once I discovered that this same account had been copying multiple other creators’ ads word for word. Maria Wendt. Evelyn Weiss. Others. There are Reddit threads about how they operate.
Where I landed: a carousel post showing the side-by-side comparisons, with their details obscured. Not to drag them publicly, but as a quiet heads-up to the people in my world. If you’ve seen my ads and you come across theirs, you’ll know. And now you’ll know to steer well clear.
The Mindset Shift That Made All of This Manageable
The moment I stopped asking “how do I get justice?” and started asking “what outcome do I actually want here?” — everything got clearer.
Legal action across international borders is, for most small business owners, not a realistic option. It’s expensive, slow, and complicated. What I could control was: protecting my business, using available channels, making a thoughtful call about the public response, and then… letting it go.
Your peace matters as much as your profit. And sometimes the most strategic move is deciding where your line in the sand is, following through, and not letting someone else’s bad behaviour live rent-free in your head any longer than necessary.
I’ve been in business nearly 20 years. I’m honestly surprised this didn’t happen sooner.
Want the Full Story?
I go through this entire situation in detail — what the ad looked like, how the conversation with them played out, what I found when I dug into their broader ads account, and the exact steps I took at each stage — in this week’s episode of the Doing It Online podcast.
If building a business that’s genuinely yours — with original systems, proven strategies, and results that last — sounds like what you’re after, that’s exactly what we help with inside our programs.
DM me on Instagram @hellofunnels and let’s chat about which one makes sense for where you’re at right now.
