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Ashley Madison Admits It Lured Customers With 70,000 Fake 'Fembots' (arstechnica.com)
America's Federal Trade Commission is now investigating the "infidelity hookup site" Ashley Madison. In a possibly-related development, an anonymous reader writes:
Ashley Madison's new executive team "admits that it used fembots to lure men into paying to join the site," reports Arts Technica. More than 75% of the site's customers were convinced to join by an army of 70,000 fembot accounts, "created in dozens of languages by data entry workers...told to populate these accounts with fake information and real photos posted by women who had shut down their accounts on Ashley Madison or other properties owned by Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media... In reality, that lady was a few lines of PHP... In internal company e-mails, executives discussed openly that only about five percent of the site's members were real females."
The company only abandoned the practice in 2015, and CNN also reports that for years, if the site's male customers complained, Ashley Madison "threatened to send paperwork to users' homes if they disputed their bills -- potentially revealing cheaters to their spouses," while one user complained that the site also automatically signed up customers for recurring billing. "We are not threatening you. We are laying the facts to you..." one e-mail read, while another warned that "We do fight all charge backs."
The company only abandoned the practice in 2015, and CNN also reports that for years, if the site's male customers complained, Ashley Madison "threatened to send paperwork to users' homes if they disputed their bills -- potentially revealing cheaters to their spouses," while one user complained that the site also automatically signed up customers for recurring billing. "We are not threatening you. We are laying the facts to you..." one e-mail read, while another warned that "We do fight all charge backs."
I was promised real fembots!
So, they are all in jail, right?
I prefer compile time, type safe checked languages.
In all my years of using PHP in web development, I never suspected it could give me a blow job.
Some will say they deserved what they got. Some will say it's cruel and unusual. I say straight up game will get you milk, so no need to put your girl on tilt.
Not only did he replace the users with a very small shell script, but the clients too. One more round to write manbots and he can partner to release The Sims: The Dating Simulator.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are now 70000 very happy manbots.
An infidelity site is run by lying and cheating scumbags? Who could have predicted that?
Did sad blokes really believe there were all these desperate women on AM and other sites,they must be mad,stupid or both..
Time to create that spinoff fembot gaming service, with VR and AR components. "Meet your mysterious virtual lover in a GPS coordinates sent to your smartphone and experience the fulfillment with your Google cardboard. Exciting, sexy, Ashley Madison!"
More than 75% of the site's customers were convinced to join by an army of 70,000 fembot account
I'd never use a site like that to meet women, but fortunately I don't need to - I've got Slashdot for that.
The most surprising thing is that this site is still in business - apparently many people (presumably mostly men) care about getting laid more than about anything else.
Almost a year ago, a massive data breach put all the details of would-be cheaters out in the open. Result: lots of publicity, and an increase in membership numbers.
The same file, upon analyses, showed very few women on the site. Still, people continued to join the site.
The suspicion of using bots I heard about back then already, where new registered people would start to receive inviting messages from women the moment they signed up, but to read them or reply or whatever they had to start paying for the site. Yet, membership continued to rise.
It must be a pretty sad bunch that signs up for that site. No wonder the real girls stay clear of it.
Y'all know the Turing test.
But Turing didn't apparently consider that there's a substantial lowering of the bar when the validity of the test is based upon a man thinking with his dick.
I know, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"
Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er... I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", latest and greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something, for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques; not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
This is actually a huge development in computer science. These "few lines of PHP" passed the Turing test on a massive scale. Artificial intelligence is now here!
1. Make the marks come to you.
2. Profit. No "???" required.
The ever relevant xkcd
I had a friend who worked at Webcapades, the company behind Eroticy, an adult friend finder competitor. The tech they had for collecting Personal information and using it to fake personal communications was incredible. Over time they would collect names of pets, family members, etc, and this data would go into a database.
My friends job, as a 'community manager' was to maintain 50+ profiles of fake people. A fair chunk of their time was spent choosing a profile, selecting a huge list of people that profile had ever interacted with, and then writing a mass email. Based on the users selected, the message tool would list what data tokens were available for all the selected users. As my friend crafted the mail blast, they would insert tokens that would be replaced with personal information tailored to each recipient. This was in 2003, so you can imagine how much more advanced the tech for faking profiles has gotten.
Why aren't the people involved with this criminal enterprise in jail yet? What a scam.
Go to a pimp, give the pimp your name, your address, your personal preferences, and your money. Then threaten to take your money away, or to stop providing more. Did someone think that this was all an altruistic venture? Wanna tell me how the sex trade is any different no matter where it is? Was someone expecting a pimp to be above-board, honest, ethical?
Welcome to the sex trade. It has always gone hand-in-hand with the drug trade. Are you ready for legalized illicit drugs? Here's the first thing that you get to learn: the first one's free.
there are a lot of lonely guys out there. A lot of 'em stuck in loveless marriages for financial reasons, mostly because of kids. If I had a dollar for every couple married because they dropped a kid I'd be a billionaire.
Oh, and lots of people never learn to be cynical. It's a weird thought when you're a nerd because you learn cynicism at an early age when you're peers turn on you because when your better grades get you praise from teacher but you can't run as fast on the playground.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
illicit - forbidden by law, rules, or custom. cf.. "illicit drugs"
synonyms: illegal, unlawful, illegitimate, criminal, felonious;
So what's the second thing that us ignorant peons get to learn? Besides Engrish.
C'mon Charles J. Harder, time to sue.
The fact that most or all of their advertising was directed at males (using female images), it's pretty obvious if you thought about it for a second that the userbase would either be horrendously lopsided and/or fake. Which it turned out to be both. Of course if you are not thinking with the proper head, you'd go right on ahead with the sign-up.
the lie that women want sex with random men
As a general rule, not
They like sex only with prosperous, intellectually challenging men who are attached to SOMEONE ELSE.
OK, there's no sympathy for anyone running (or using) such a site, but wouldn't that be classified as fraud?
-Styopa
Alright. The free market is working!
We basement dwellers refer to them as Infiltration and Reconnaissance Units (IRU).
You mean Ruby on Rails wasn't a real lady who like train travel? /joke
Shouldn't the FCC (or other government-run agency) shut down this site for blatant false advertising?
No dating/hookup sits should have fembots or fake profiles just to lure men in. Every profile should have a real, paying person behind it. Period. Anything else is simply false advertisement.
I'd be very surprised if this wasnt done by every single dating site out there.
The divorcees should mount a class action.
There used to be a criminal offense known as "fraud". Does it still exist on the statute books and have all the directors and executives and most of the programmers of Ashley Madison been prosecuted under it and imprisoned? If not, why not?
Some fembots are pretty irresistible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTv9AhCuSU4