 Hey folks, we are answering frequently asked questions from the octa customer identity cloud community and today We are going to discuss how to resolve the user already exists error when creating a new user And you cannot find an existing user in the user search. Let's get started This issue will typically occur with custom database connections with import mode Either on or off if a new user is unable to sign up because of a user already exists error Most of the time you will be able to find the existing account in a user search However, if you do not see any existing users with the same user name or email There are a couple of different troubleshooting steps to resolve this issue The first step would be to confirm whether or not the custom databases get user script is returning a user profile for the affected user The get user script will execute before creating a new user to make sure that the user doesn't exist in the external database If the script returns a profile instead of returning no we interpret that as the user already exists and prevent the creation To test this go to the custom database connection on the dashboard then on the custom database tab Scroll down to our get user script We can use the save and try button and test with the affected users email If the script returns a profile We know it exists in the external database and that's why a new user account wasn't able to be created If this script returns null there is one more step We can take to resolve this issue for this other scenario if a custom database has import mode on and a user changes Their password before they have logged in and migrated a shadow user profile is created on the Auth0 side with the new password This exists so that the user can log in with their new password and fully migrate However, you will not be able to see the record for this shadow user until they log in If a user does this and then tries to create a new user account There will be an error that this user already exists even though you cannot find it in the user search If this occurs have the user try to log in with the new password that they set If they do not remember that password the next option would be to delete the shadow record So that this user can log in and be created to do this use the delete user by email endpoint of the management API Enter the connection ID for your custom database in the path and include their email as a query parameter to delete the shadow record of the user A response code of 204 will tell you that this shadow record of the user no longer exists And you can have this user now create a new account Today we looked at how to resolve the user already exists error when creating a new user and you cannot find an existing user in a user search If you found this video helpful, please like and subscribe to us on YouTube and join us for more content on community.auth0.com