Slashdot Mirror
Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Message Men
An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz looked through the source code contained in the recent Ashley Madison data dump and found evidence that the company created tens of thousands of bot accounts designed to spur their male users into action by sending them messages. "The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager." The evidence suggests bots sent over 20 million messages on the website, and chatted with people over 11 million times. The vast majority of fake accounts — 70,529 to 43 — pretended to be female, and the users targeted were almost entirely men. Comments left in the code indicate some of the issues Ashley Madison's engineers had to solve: "randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time" and "for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager." The AI was unsophisticated, though one type of bot would try to convince men to pay and then pass them to a real person.
How is this legal? Tricking people into paying for accounts by convincing them that someone is trying to message them would be fraud, wouldn't it?
Men looking to get laid got lied to and exploited.
News at 11.
Porn/cam/sexchat sites regularly do this too, and probably pretty much 100% of the rest of the adult on-line hook-up/dating sites as well. Sorry guys, melonsacidhoney69 isn't real. Neither is Pro Wrestling. Sorry.
Heck you can check it yourself: sign up for a paid for dating site, put the photos into Google image search, and see how long it takes before you get a fake. But sexual desperation is such that men will still go there,
I'll do you even one better.. TINEYE plugin ... just right click and search the image on tineye.. saves a lot of hassle for many reasons.. dating only being one of them
This is exactly true. Match.com seemed to be legit 10+ years ago, but these days it's a total scam. I signed up for an account there recently (since I'm back in the market and all....), since I wasn't getting far on OKCupid, thinking I'd try a different site to see if there was a different crowd of women there. It completely reeked of being a scam; I never did give them any money, thankfully, but the signs were pretty obvious. First, while it was possible to fill out your profile for free and look at others', so many things required a paid account: receiving mail, seeing who "liked" you, etc. And second, just how many "likes" and emails I received, even though I hadn't mailed anyone else. For a month or two after signing up, I was barraged with emails saying I had received personal messages from women, that tons of women had "liked" me, etc. Yeah, bullshit. I've been on OKC more than long enough to know that men almost never receive unsolicited messages from women (and when they do, those women usually aren't too desirable, sorry to say). There's no way I'm getting tons of emails from beautiful women after sticking up a profile and a couple of photos and doing little else. Anyway, I kept getting emails from match.com for 2-3 months after this, constantly trying to get me to come back, pay money to read these supposed messages, etc., but it finally stopped.
As far as I can tell, most of these dating sites these days are scams. OKCupid seems to be completely legit; I haven't seen anything that reeks of fakery there, however the male:female ratio is of course poor as you'd expect and women who are at all desirable get bombarded with messages from men. From what I've read, eHarmony seems to be legit, but it's also completely geared towards conservative Christians so if you're not one of those, then don't bother. AFAICT, Tinder is completely legit too, but it's not a site at all, really more of a hookup app and because of its lack of detailed profiles, doesn't facilitate finding compatible partners.