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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.
I don't remember any blow jobs, but it's sure fucked me plenty of times.
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.
I don't remember any blow jobs, but it's sure fucked me plenty of times.
No, no, no. That's Javascript.
An infidelity site is run by lying and cheating scumbags? Who could have predicted that?
But you knew it sucked right?
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!
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.
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/
What did they expect? If they weren't cheating and lying to their spouses, they could of just said, "OK, go ahead. Send paper work to my house."
But I don't suppose that Ashley Madison would have allowed it to be as simply solved as that.
I prefer being fucked by Ruby.
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.
Ruby the Red-Nosed Boss?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
C'mon Charles J. Harder, time to sue.
OK, there's no sympathy for anyone running (or using) such a site, but wouldn't that be classified as fraud?
-Styopa
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.
While the victims are not innocent. They were tricked into it. Much like in entrapment (An illegal activity in the US where law enforcement tries to pressure someone into breaking a law so they can bust them). So for some of these people they mad had been going threw some hard times and those bots seemed to fill whatever void that were looking for, thinking it was a real person.
Most people after making a long term commitment have a tendency to reflect if life was better if I did X differently. Then there is a "person" seeming really to show you that SO that you could of had des if you just waited a bit longer.
Now most people are mature enough to remember all the pain and confususion going threw their life at the time and realize it is a bad idea combined if you had any feelings towards your SO how much pain you will cause her if they found out.
But having these bots to trick you is breaking up relationships that may had survived after that period of angst.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I expect for many of the "clients" they were looking for the illusion that they were more attractive than they really were. Being they were looking for the illusion they were willing to set aside belief.
Biologically men are more wired to seek out many partners, while woman tend to focus on one person. But sex drive makes us do stupid things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't know, it might be bash. From a bash prompt:
$ %blow
bash: fg: %blow: no such job
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
That's not entrapment. They already signed up on a website for cheating spouses. There's clear intent to participate. While the ultimate decision to go ahead with the action in a particular circumstance is up in the air, that's outside the bounds of entrapment.
For this to be entrapment AM would have needed to send someone to specifically solicit an individual to cheat out of the blue. e.g. hired girl approaches married target out of the blue and a asks him to sleep with her. THAT'S entrapment.
Guy goes to a singles mixer and a girl hits on him evem though she knows he's married but wants to mess with him, that's not entrapment.
Replace dating with a crime (drug purchase works well) and now we have a better understanding of entrapment.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.