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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.
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?
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.
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.
In some places sex workers are completely legal, being unionized and having political representation. IMHO that is what to strive for - why make one kind of service so different to all other services that are provided? [Well the answer are Christians, "protectors of morality" and "protectors of women" - even though a huge portion of sex workers are men and the morality of not allowing sex services are iffy at best]
Now forcing people to sell sex in any way should have serious consequences, treating each forced sexual interaction as a rape seems reasonable.
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.
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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.