Analysis Reveals Almost No Real Women On Ashley Madison

gurps_npc writes: Ashley Madison claimed to have about 31 million men and 5.5 million woman enrolled. Those odds are not good for the men, 6:1. But unfortunately, most of those 'women' were fake. This researcher analyzed the data and found only 12,000 actual, real women using Ashley Madison. That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women. There are reports that Ashley Madison paid people to create fake female profiles. Their website admits that 'some of the users may be there for "entertainment purposes."' The article itself is well written, including a description of the analysis. A charitable person would say that Ashley Madison was selling a fantasy, not reality. But a realist would say Ashley Madison is just a thief stealing money from lonely, unhappy men.

Comments

"stealing money from lonely, unhappy men."

[umafuckit]

Go watch "Love Me" (available on Netflix) about Ukrainian "mail order" brides. Those guys are charging ten bucks per message from the guy to the woman. Ostensibly because of the translation services they off. One of the dudes on there was out $10k on messages to one woman alone.

AM could be a honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was an extortion honeypot, TBH. It's possible that the CEO has criminal connections, or ties to a government intelligence operation. Think about the leverage that could be applied to government officials, politicians, corporate managers, etc. with this information. For example, it's exactly the kind of info the CIA uses against foreign government officials in order to turn them into intelligence assets. And there's already reports of outed AM account holders being extorted to pay up to get their information removed or the blackmailers will forward the info directly to spouses, friends, family, and co-workers. The timing of the release kind of suspect as well. In addition, another site (Rentboy.com, I think) that potentially has damaging info on its account holders was recently raided by the FBI. What if that was a pre-emptive raid in order to keep its database from falling into the hands of hackers and released to the internet? This is Alex Jones territory, I know, but the stated reasons by the Impact Team for releasing the data just doesn't hold water for me.

Re:Aha!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If I recall correctly, classmates.com was part of a class action suit about that same sort of behavior.

You recall correctly; this is exactly what they were doing.

I made up a fake profile on Classmates under the name of "Fuckyou Fakename" and within 24 hours I had notifications that "several" of my old classmates (including some females) had "read my profile" and "wanted to connect". And some of them had snippets of text that was grayed out with only the first few words showing, like "Hi there, remember me? I always..." (grayed out text....)

The idea, obviously, was to get me to send them money to find out who was interested in me. Total fail, 100%.