Ashley Madison ‘faked’ profiles

LONDON: As if the thought of their identities being leaked on the dark web wasn’t bad enough, cheating male users of the hacked infidelity website Ashley Madison may have ruined their relationships in pursuit of fake females.

The huge scale of the apparent deception has become clear through research showing that just three in every 10 000 members are real, active women users. The website claims that 5.5 million of its 37 million customers are “female”, but there is “a good chance” that just 12 000 users are genuine women members who log in to their accounts, with many appearing to be fakes.

The revelations come from Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the technology website Gizmodo, who analysed the membership data recently leaked on the dark web by hackers.

“This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives,” she wrote. “It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database.

“Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbertlike engineer has replaced them with badly designed robots.

“When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.”

Newitz became suspicious of the sheer extent of the distortion after finding out that 10 000 accounts

were

had been created with Ashleymadison.com e-mail addresses, implying that they were test subscriptions, and 9 000 of these belonged to women.

She then studied IP addresses – numerical “ID cards” for computers which reveal user location – and discovered that the second most popular IP address, found in 80 805 profiles, was an address probably created on a “home” computer within Ashley Madison. Almost 69 000 of the profiles created with that IP address were female.

Newitz said the “huge disparity” strengthened her suspicions. “Obviously fake accounts were overwhelmingly female, and numbered in the tens of thousands,” she said.

Newitz found that fewer than 1 500 women on the site had ever checked their messages, compared with 20 million or more men who checked theirs. “It was a serious anomaly,” she wrote.

What’s more, only 2 400 women ever used the chat tool, as opposed to more than 11 million men; and only 9 700 of the women had ever replied to a message, compared with 5.9 million men.

The website has yet to comment.

In 2013 a former Ashley Madison employee claimed she was asked to create hundreds of fake profiles of “alluring females” to attract male subscribers. Doriana Silva, a Brazilian, claimed in a lawsuit against the website in 2012 that she had incurred repetitive strain injury after being made to type in up to 1 000 fake female members. The case was settled out of court, and Ashley Madison claimed that the woman never made any fake profiles. – The Independent

‘Obviously

fake accounts

overwhelmingly

female, and

numbered in the

tens of thousands’