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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!
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.