I’m cynically amused to find that Ashley Madison (“Life’s too short. Have an affair!”) was conning its male customers into spending untold millions of dollars in the hope of finding willing female partners who mostly didn’t exist, except in the shape of fake electronic profiles. Gizmodo reports:
When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.
What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. 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 Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.
Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.
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.
There’s more at the link.
I could almost (but don’t really) feel sorry for the duped men involved. They should have seen this coming from a mile off. Any Web site that takes your money and promises sexual fulfillment in exchange is basically a rip-off. After all, what does it have to offer except electrons? In order to get you to part with your hard-earned cash, it tries to disguise those electrons in the form of shapely would-be partners, or hot and sweaty on-screen antics, or heavy breathing and passionate sounds . . . but all of them reach you as electrons. None of them are real.
I’m not surprised that the operators of the Ashley Madison ‘service’ made up so many fake female profiles. I sincerely hope they’ll face criminal trial for fraud – quite apart from the mushrooming civil lawsuits being filed around the world by men who’ve just found out that they were being taken for a ride (and not of the sexual variety, at that). Perhaps now the latter will realize that they need to get a life instead of a computer . . . but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that.
*Snort*
Peter
That reminds me of the punchline to an old joke. When visiting a brothel ("Grandma's Whorehouse"), a patron is shunted through several doors/hallways each promising a better refinement of what he wants, and each charging a price. The final door puts him outside, on the street, with a recorded voice saying, "Thank you for visiting Grandma's Whorehouse. You have just been screwed!"
That's the reason why I could never understand men's fascination with strip clubs or booby bars. You over pay for bad booze and food and you get to "watch" women. Big whoop.
Steve
Maybe the old saw about the bird in the hand is better than the two in the bush is applicable here. Come to think of it maybe on more than one level!
Fake female profiles and phony computer generated messages to male profiles have been a common tactic by numerous dating site operators. In fact, a few have been sued over the practice.
No surprise to see it show up here.
So maybe the Ashley Madison hackers were just a bunch of blue-balled customers who decided to take revenge. Having to pay money to list online, with virtually no chance of getting the attention that they want? I'd get a little pissed-off and want (non-sexual) satisfaction too!
According to the note they posted to AM this is exactly the case. Their demand was for AM to clean up or shut down. AM could not clean up since they did not in fact have any real women to offer. And they chose to expose their customers rather than shut down.
Let's consider the options here:
-1) Get all excited and heated up over a pixelated female to have a fantasy experience with for a few bucks… sorta like buying a Playboy Magazine a few years back for your sexual fantasies, or
-2) Go get a real girl to indulge your passions with.
Number two carries a host of extreme dangers with it. With today's modern American woman, involvement with one can mean anything from contacting a life-long STD to losing your home, car and bank account, even a long jail term because she decided – the next morning – to cry "RAPE".
In my view, many of today's young men indulge in this sort of sexual fantasy for the simple reason that so many of today's females are man-hating progressive feminist nightmares. Even to talk to one often entails tippy-toeing thru a minefield of bad attitude, hardly worth the effort.
In other words, today's females represent too much risk, too little reward.
Perhaps that's why sites like Ashley Madison have become so prominent.
Heck, a good number of the men using the site might very well have known that the women they were 'hooking up with' were fake. For some people the fantasy is more important than the reality. It could even have been a sort of role play for some of them because there are people who very much enjoy that sort of thing, though if that were the case the site probably should have hinted that as its function to help avoid confusion.