Most female profiles on Ashley Madison fake, study suggests
Gawker affiliate analyzed account inbox activity for signs of human life
Just five months ago, Ashley Madison’s Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media was boasting about how great business was, saying demand for the site’s services was booming among women in particular.
In an interview with Bloomberg in April, Ashley Madison’s head of international relations, Christoph Kraemer, estimated the company’s value at US$1 billion, pegging the ratio of men to women in the 30-45 age range at roughly 50-50. Unfortunately, Kraemer said, “it’s been difficult in North America to find the support to go public,” so the IPO would have to be on the London Stock Exchange.
In Europe, you see, attitudes are more liberal about things like websites that profit by matching up married people who want to have affairs. Affairs people were definitely having. With real women, women they met on the website Ashley Madison dot com. And if people want to clutch their pearls about living human women using a service like Ashley Madison to have sexy, sexy affairs — well, life is short, as the company’s marketing slogan goes.
But on Wednesday, a data analysis by the Gawker affiliate Gizmodo revealed all those cheating-hearted scoundrels whose personal information was dumped online in a hacking attack were probably not doing much cheating at all. Gizmodo analyzed Ashley Madison’s 5.5 million female profiles and concluded only about 12,000 of them displayed evidence of being connected to actual women who used the site, with many of the remaining profiles showing signs that point to fakery by the site’s administrators.
Gizmodo analyzed email addresses, IP addresses and the last time female users checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox to look for signs of human life. The data showed about 9,700 women had ever replied to a message (compared with 5.9 million men) and about 2,400 had used the chat system (compared to 11 million men).
Meanwhile, the data analysis found a lot of signs suggesting something fishy was going on. About 10,000 accounts were registered to ashleymadison.com email addresses, while about 81,000 appear to have been created on an Ashley Madison computer, based on their IP addresses.
In response to a request for comment, Avid Life referred to past statements on the hack that do not address the allegations in the Gizmodo analysis. If those allegations are true — if 31.3 million men were effectively paying to talk dirty to a cardboard cut-out of Kate Upton, thinking they were going to get the real deal in bed — that’s likely the last nail in the coffin for the site, said dating company consultant Mark Brooks.
“I think people would have forgiven (the security breach). I think they would have got over that, as long as they put safeguards in place so it doesn’t happen again,” Brooks said. “This, they don’t move on from. This means this brand is not trustworthy. That’s a big deal.”
Twitter had fun with the news, joking about places where you can find #MoreChicksThanAshleyMadison: A Civil War re-enactment, a Rush concert, the Saudi Union of Professional Driving Instructors. But dating websites that have padded their female profiles
It’s kind of like a pyramid selling scheme, except there’s no pyramid.
with fakes have run into trouble before.
In October, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with U.K.-based JDI Dating Ltd., finding that it had used “fake, computer-generated profiles to trick users into upgrading to paid memberships.” JDI was prohibited from the practice and had to pay about US$600,000 in restitution under the terms of the settlement.
Queen’s business professor Ken Wong said Avid Life might be able to argue it didn’t deceive consumers as long as there were at least a few real women looking for affairs on the site.
A clause in Ashley Madison’s terms of service says many profiles are for “amusement only.”
But even if the site avoids legal sanctions, Wong said it’s not an ethical way to conduct business.
“It’s kind of like a pyramid selling scheme, except there’s no pyramid. It’s the same basic philosophy — all I’ve got to do is sign you up,” Wong said.
“It is truly morally reprehensible.”