Ashley Madison founder steps down
bbc.com
bbc.com
I would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.
That's shady business no matter what you think. I personally have zero empathy for Ashley Madison and for what's happening to them.
Edit://
Adult Friend Finder actually pays an absurdly higher payout for referrals whom happen to be women, because they don't get many women signing up.
So it's usually safer to cheat someone if you can do so in a manner that would also humiliate them if their role in the con was exposed. They discount what they lost by the price of their own dignity and reputation.
It's in the fine print usually that some accounts are there for "entertainment purposes".
I think it would be naive to not suspect these sites of having a very skewed male subscribership in addition to using chat bots or paid people to engage customers.
You agree to the terms and conditions upon account creation, even if you don't read them.
A person's ignorance and naivety is not evidence of fraud.
Nor did the T&C say or imply that any percent of the account will be genuine, or that there would be plenty of male and female accounts.
The customers paid for the ability to read messages sent to them by anyone (employee, bot or real person), nothing more.
Assuming something when you've been explicitly told otherwise but chose to ignore it does not equate to fraud.
A person's naivety and ignorance don't equate to being defrauded.
Their landing page says:
>Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating.
Their Google ads say:
>Have an affair -- Guaranteed
Only conclusion to draw here is that you are a bot.
5. Other Aspects of the Ashley Madison Service – For Your Entertainment
Our Site and our Service gives users the opportunity to explore their fantasies
and to interact with others in the Site. However, there is no guarantee you will
find a date or partner on our Site or using our Service. Our Site and our Service
also is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment. You agree that some
of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment.
Others Using the Site for Entertainment
You also understand and agree that there are users and members on the Site that
use and subscribe to our Service for purely entertainment purposes. Those users and
subscribers are not seeking physical meetings with anyone they meet on the Service,
but consider their communications with users and members to be for their amusement.
You acknowledge and agree that any profiles of users and members, as well as,
communications from such persons may not be true, accurate or authentic and may be
exaggerated or fantasy. You acknowledge and understand that you may be communicating
with such persons and that we are not responsible for such communications.
Seems pretty clear to me - absolutely no claim you will actually find someone to "hook-up" with. Absolutely states there are accounts being used that have no interest in you other than for entertainment purposes (ie. keeping you engaged).
No fraud here, only bruised egos.
Marketing says guaranteed. Tiny print says "oh, heh, no guarantees". It has all of the elements of fraud.
Additionally, no where in what you posted does it say that their employees or bots will be interacting with you as if they were a user, member, or subscriber.
You acknowledge and understand that you
may be communicating with such persons
and that we are not responsible for such
communications.
As the writer of the Gizmodo exposes said, it was like cheating Farmville.
Ashley Madison didn't invent dating sites, and certainly didn't invent this MO. I'd wager it's pretty standard for all dating sites. AM just happened to be the first (or most prominent?) dating site that advertised having an affair/cheating.
I see no fraud here -- only bruised egos, a few ruined marriages, and the embarrassing truth that some men will go to extreme lengths to speak with women, even when it flies in the face of absurdity.
The way it works is that if you don't hook up within the specified time (I believe it's 120 days) then they refund your money. And technically speaking, this is not a lie.
What they don't tell you is that they process the refund in the form of a check, with their name on it, mailed to your home address.
Given that the entire concept of the site is to attract users who want to keep their activity secret from the people they live with, how many people will actually go through with asking for their guarantee to be honored?
(I know that there are legitimate uses of the site that don't require going behind your spouse's back. But it's pretty clear that most of their user base was using it that way.)
Several aspects of Ashley Madison are described in the Terms and Conditions as "For Your Entertainment."[19] This included Ashley's Angels, a feature that generated fictitious profiles to simulate communication with real members and perform market research. According to the site, Ashley's Angels accounts "are NOT conspicuously identified as such."[20] Ashley's Angels profiles were limited to messaging only guest accounts and users could opt out of the feature via their profile management page. Users were charged the standard rate to read messages from and chat with these fictitious profiles.
But then AM adds a whole extra layer ontop, which is marketed for affairs. And there I feel the disposition towards cheating also differs between sexes. At least, intentional, planned cheating. i.e. woman probably cheat just as often, but it's probably very much a male thing to register on a website specific for dating guys who cheat (and being comfortable then, with the notion that whoever you're meeting is also a cheater), pay a whole load of money for this, and then hook up with guys you know are cheating on their wives. Whereas a man who's looking to cheat probably doesn't care much that the woman he's hooking up with is cheating on her husband. There's this whole layer of 'family wrecking' and notions about sex that men and women probably, on average, think differently about. Most women who are comfortable with such relationships are probably part of a swinger couple anyway which isn't cheating and not part of AM's market.
The combination of the two is such that you get ridiculous ratios. But yeah even I was surprised to hear it was apparently something like 1:2000 right? That's just hilariously pathetic if you think about it.
That's kind of the entire idea behind an auditor.
You're just creating hoops, but you're not stopping anyone.
Auditors work with privileged information in order to provide assurances to third-parties that the audited entity is operating in a legitimate way. Sometimes they receive a sampling of data to spot-check things, while other times their review necessitates more-broad access. Both of these approaches necessitate some level of access to what would otherwise be considered confidential information, but audits are performed with the understanding that the firm conducting the audit has as-much to lose by compromising the data privacy of a client as the client. It makes no sense for a reputable auditor to expose the information they're analyzing because it would destroy their firm's reputation, and put them out of business.
No, but there should have been. Access to personal customer data should be strictly controlled, with access being granted only to those who need it for their work, and only for as long as they need it.
I would never expect them to do that, but they should do that.
Is it really true though? The estimates were, what, 1,400 available women in total? It's anecdotal but there are thousands of accounts online of people saying they were able to hook up with women and a few who even ended up marrying the woman they hooked it up. Seems a great deal of those would either have to be made up or the estimate people came up with is wildly wrong.
I'm not entirely convinced yet.
Of course, there are also plenty of real men that would consider "women on there invariably ignore me" to be a far worse admission than "I joined a site to cheat on my wife".
I'm not saying the hypothesis that the hack team manipulated the data to make it look even worse is beyond the realms of possibility, but it's even easier to believe one of the sleaziest sites on the internet knew how to do black-hat PR.
That whole story seemed bogus and now the data would suggest that it probably is.
I think news outlets publish stuff like that because it's pure clickbait and will get traffic. It reads like a press release for AM.
Likely more than that on a site like AM.
11,000,000 active accounts, of which about 2,000 were women. That's a 5,500 : 1 ratio.
That's why we end up in a situation when 20% of guys have sex with like 80-90% of women, and the rest 80% of the guys are struggling online, in bars, in gyms, etc.
I'd wager it's way more than 5-10 per day, and I'd wager that it takes a fairly long time to ascertain which one is actually a rich guy.
It's like saying you're fine with getting pelted by a dozen rocks a day, because probably one a week is going to be a golden nugget.
Where do you live? In New York, the split seems to be much closer to 50/50. In fact, during the day there seem to be more women (though I'm guessing that's because more men than women have day-jobs, and so women probably tend to run errands during the day rather than after work.
hi [that's the whole message]
u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]
hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady
This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?
In fact, it usually went more like:
"Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you"
"Thanks, but no thanks"
"Fine bitch, you ugly anyway"
That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.
Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.
I also worked as a moderator for a (local) dating site. We only checked on the messages that were reported either by the users or by the anti-spam filters. Also this was clearly specified in the privacy policy and EULA pages.
9 times out of 10, the response was "Well, you ain't all that".
The implicit assumption was that girls should feel flattered to have some random man tell them they're attractive, and have no ego or self-confidence of their own.
Yoga, Tennis, Beach Volleyball all have a high percentage of women. And whole foods...
http://pics.city-data.com/agegraph/2455.png
(This is for residents of SF only, so it won't account for any differences that might arise due to commuters who live outside SF)
Edit, source page: http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses-San-Francisco-Califo...
UK Birmingham: my experience is the total inverse of that. I work a three day week in a College that is a reasonable commute from where I live. Bus and train.
One early morning per week (out at 6am): cleaners and nurses.
One night I'm coming home after 9pm. Its (mostly female) care staff coming off shift until we hit the outskirts of Birmingham when we pick up some of the the postal workers coming off shift.
Other commutes: admin and retail workers - mostly women.
One of the other days of the traditional working week I'm doing sessional work locally and its women and children all the way on a mid-morning and late afternoon bus ride.
Chaps: construction workers going into the New St site of an early morning come in by coach and have breakfast in a cafe. Guess what gender the cooks and servers are. And guess how they got to work.
Rooms mostly full of women: management meetings. I work in UK public sector (and its fine).
They should take a few pages from the TSA playbook!
I was on AM about six years ago, over a two month period. I'm in a Poly relationship and at the time was searching for a new partner. I chatted with a couple dozen women. Don't think they were software robots. Met with six or so. Definitely not robots. Still with one, who I love and adore. The women I met were all quite good looking and quite sexual. Was introduced to the nude selfie - an eye opener.
Perhaps the fakery came after my time, or perhaps the assertion that there were no women on AM is just not true.
I was hoping the opposite. Lying to your users may well be a viable strategy for this sort of business, as the users aren't likely to band together than share information. But failing to inform potential investors that your business is based on fake accounts is both legally actionable and highly risky.
How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake?
My disappointed guess would be that this is not as large a handicap as you might expect. Each struggling business's hope is that they can "pivot" to a different model before they fall apart. Sometimes this is a polite fiction, but sometimes they manage to do it.
Someone should take it to the next level, create a similar site but give people a cut of the revenue for leading men on past the paywall. Outsource the staff, essentially.
I would have thought such a security breach would have taken down the entire business model but nope they're still going. I'm sure a lot more senior staff will have to step down in order to rebrand at some point so they can distance themselves from this disaster.
Plus anyone can add someone to the service AND there are plenty of people who enjoy the trill of simply looking and not doing anything.
So yeah I don't think it's a slam dunk that they're all "cheating jerks". Though I'm sure plenty are :)
2005-
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-trouble/
"Darren Morgenstern is a happily married man who runs ashleymadison.com, a Web site for attached people with cheating on their minds. "When monogamy becomes monotony: That's our trademark slogan,"
2002-
https://web.archive.org/web/20040214171743/http://www.ashley...
The site identified itself specifically for adultery, and that angle earned them an enormous amount of free press.
Yes, though it's harder to add someone as a paying member using a card in their name and tied to their address. Based on the stories that have come out, it sounds like there are dates on those payments.
That doesn't necessarily mean everyone was a "cheating jerk", and even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean a judgmental response is the healthiest response the rest of us can give.
Of the "cheating jerks" that were "cheating jerks", who did they have to cheat with?
Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. There was a study that showed food recalls have an impact on purchasing but it wasn't huge, people certainly didn't stop. Though I can't find the article I had read a long time ago about this.
Oh well.
but It wasn't really objectionable or anything.
After some time, there is a possibility that I will forget about the breach, but I don't think that there's a possibility that I will forget about Ashley Madison as a company.
The hack and exposures, combined with the revelation most of the accounts are men.. yeah they won't make it another year.
I am an Ashley Madison user, although probably not typical in any respect. And yes, my details are in the leak. Me and my wife grew up and married within the mormon church, complete with its absolutely distorted view of human sexuality. After leaving mormonism, we came to realize our sexual maturity had been stunted and wanted to experience new things...we now have a somewhat open marriage. We set a few ground rules because we do love each other and didn't want to break up, but then we set out on our quests to find other partners.
I tried the tinder thing, and that was okay. I tried just going to bars, and that was okay. I came away feeling a little skeezy, despite being completely honest with my wife, because I had to be dishonest with the girls I was meeting...nobody in those situations responds well to "Oh, by the way, I'm married", no matter how clear you are about it being okay with your wife. I also grew tired of hookups and one night stands very quickly. I wanted to meet women that occasionally wanted to meet up, but were okay with the fact that I had a family life and couldn't just run away any time either of us wanted some. Tinder and bars were definitely the wrong target market.
While I was doing this, my wife skipped straight to Ashley Madison. Put up a few pictures, and within seconds she was getting more messages than she could read. Like literally 500+ messages a day. She tried to filter them by stating explicitly on her profile what she was not interested in (specifically, out of shape or over 45yo). It didn't stop them. Most of the messages could be described as follows: Shrivelled or obese old men (my wife is 29 btw) well over 45 (including several senior citizens), accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, and messages about how they could last all night long or whatever. Some men were a lot closer to what she was looking for, but after filtering out all the garbage she didn't feel up to the task of trying to message back. She decided to ignore the messages and try messaging men herself. They either didn't respond, or they messaged back asking if she was a fake profile. She eventually was successful in finding what she wanted, but it was pretty significant effort.
I grew frustrated with the expectations of tinder and bars, and reluctantly decided to try AM. After seeing my wife's experience, I knew I was in for a sausage fest competition, but I also learned quickly what was a turnoff to women and I am pretty attractive myself, so I thought I had a chance. My perspective from the guy's side? For the most part, it is an extremely expensive scam. A single message will cost you $1-2 depending on the points package you bought (women don't pay for anything). If you want a priority message, it costs double that. All you get with a priority message is a guarantee that your message will not be buried in the 500+ message/day inbox of the woman you are trying to message. It can still get buried, but it only gets buried under other priority messages. I had 20+ messages a day from other women (or, more accurately, profiles of women). It was very obvious that most of them were fake, so I didn't bother with the obvious ones. Some of them were less obvious fakes. Some of them were scams to get you to sign up for other sites, or paid "background checks" from women who "just want to be safe". And occasionally, I got messages from actual women, but I never was interested in them.
I did have some success with talking to and meeting actual women. Based on my experience, I would estimate that 1000 is a pretty low estimate for the total number of active women on the site. I would probably ballpark 100-200 in my metro area, at least between 20-40yo. And here's another surprise...about half of them were single. In fact, all of the women I ended up meeting in person were single. But yes, it was quite obvious that the vast majority were completely fake.
I actually feel like I enjoyed my AM experience, but can totally understand why you wouldn't if you aren't comparatively young and attractive. For them, I guess you could blame it on AM being a scam site as much as you could blame it on having inflated expectations of what you could get out of it. I mean, if you are 50+, overweight, and have no clue how to talk to women, of course you aren't going to land a date with a 20yo hotbody. And yet it happened...thousands of men threw away their money in an attempt to hook up with my wife. I'd estimate AM made at least $5000 from my wife alone, in the two months she was active on it.
And then there is the leak problem. I wasn't worried about my wife finding out, and I'm not worried about divorce...but I am worried about my extended family finding my email address, because they are all super judgmental mormons (albeit with naive kind hearts). I have had to come up with a cover story with my wife if they approached her about it. My life won't end if they find out...it just will just become a lot more tense with my extended family. I also now have to worry about moral crusaders in background checks and other situations...I get the opportunity to tell people my situation is different while they smile, nod, and judge me as a sleazy cheater. That sucks. Add to that the fact that we couldn't delete our profiles without paying a ransom, and it totally sucks. And while the majority of the active users were likely men trying to cheat on their wives, there were tons of people just like me, as well as other situations (including single people, homosexuals, polyamorous, etc.) where they weren't cheating but they did want something direct and discrete.
TL;DR: Not a complete scam, just mostly. The site really was mostly a bunch of desperate men talking to bots and getting ignored by women, and paying out the nose for the privilege. And Avid Life Media is a pile of shit company that deserves their inevitable bankruptcy. Their executive team is both nefarious and negligent and should be burned at the metaphorical stake. I hope they shut down the company before the picture data gets released.
And maybe have some empathy for the users that got caught up in the leak, because all you have is proof that they signed up for a website, but you don't have any clue as to their situation nor intentions.
Adding a "post anonymously" checkbox instead of creating a throw away account may be worth pursuing, but it's hard to know if making anonymous posting easier would be a net positive for the site.
Please don't take this as an "all women are gold diggers" sort of thing. <sigh> But that may explain why there were a lot of single women.
I think a good idea would be to have "verified-but-anonymized" posts tied to the amount of karma you have (just like downvotes). After building up some reputation, you could occasionally post an anonymized comment, and have it distinguished by the fact that it is done by an HN regular.
How can a business with 30+ million male users looking for sex outside marriage exist for 14 years while the site has no female users except for bots!!! Are you saying all those people were stupid enough to not realize they were not going to get laid(and kept paying too)?
It seems when you have advertising money and a cost structure that let's you make money and stay alive, you don't even have to have a real product! It makes sense to invest on people not ideas!
I wonder how many other BIG companies are pulling the same tricks to get unrealistic valuations (Twitter and Uber, they are not worth that much, especially Uber)
They say you can't cheat an honest man. So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
Discretion. Most of the people on Ashley Madison presumably were wanting to keep their attempted affairs a secret. Most of them were probably not in "swinging" relationships, or indeed they would go to regular dating websites and just advertise their open relationship status.
> So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
That's basically the sales pitch for Ashley Madison. "Want to cheat? Here's some women who want to cheat with you."
Hindsight has its benefits here, but I already automatically suspect anyone asking for my e-mail address of turning around to sell it to the highest bidder.
If I'm looking for discretion, this is what I expect to see on the HTTP site: "You are being redirected to our secure site." And this is what I expect to see on the HTTPS site: "How to delete this site from your browser history and router logs" and "How to access our Tor hidden service."
Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
But I'm probably more untrusting than most.
And there will probably always be people willing to visit http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php to create a new account and upload their dankest, dirtiest, and most embarrassing secrets, for free!
Wait. Wait. I got that address wrong. It's actually https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip-application/ . And they got hacked, too.
>Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
If you need to use Tor and bitcoins to avoid detection by your spouse.... Well I'd say stop cheating on them because (s)he's a keeper.
I was thinking more along the lines of skirting the bounds of some malum prohibitum crime--like buying unlicensed Mickey Mouse apparel, or eating a protected species, or building an outhouse in the wrong spot--where a certain someone other than my spouse might come down on me like a ton of turds if it ever found out.
The gummint is a lot more concerned about policing my behavior than my spouse. And it's more uptight about what I'm doing when it's not around. Like a stalker, really. Tor and Bitcoin is demonstrably not enough to keep it off my back, and it is definitely not a keeper.
Yeah, that makes you not the target audience. Ashley Madison was sold as a place meet someone to have a secret affair with. The people looking for this generally wanted to hide it from their spouses most of all.
Undoubtedly, they had some customers that were on the site with their spouses' knowledge and approval, but this was most certainly a minority. That minority is probably bothered by this leak in the same way they are bothered by the OPM leak, but they aren't terrified of their spouses' reactions.
This isn't even close to the levels required for entertaining TV, but in my humble opinion, the comment is neither bad enough to downvote, nor good enough to upvote, I merely suspect a lot of HN's readership is just too young to get the reference or had a knee-jerk reaction to soaps in general (which, hey, I hate the overly-dramatic nature of soaps too; but apparently what Dallas did was still novel in the 80s, and worth dragging out for a pop-culture reference now and then).
Treatment:
Name: Ashley Madison or some generic name so as to avoid copyright and naming issues.
Dramatis Personae: Ashley Madison President, Ashley Madison programmers, IPO Finance Team, Hacker team
Story Arcs:
A Story: Follow the Ashley Madison president as he goes about his 2014-2015 tour to promote the site across the globe, focus on the Japanese campaign, in preparation for the IPO. Detail the trials and tribulations of the IPO setup, pressures from the M&A team. Then lead up to the hack and the bourbon scotch being thrown against a wall as a man who built an empire realizes it is crashing. The programmers in Ashley Madison trying to figure out if the data was expropriated, how much, and lead up to the internal discussions on the blackmail offer.
B Story: The hacker group recruits team members, identify weak points and sets up to acquire the data. Once the data has been lifted, they struggle on what to do with a release, expecting to have received blackmail monies, fending off the popularity it brings to them and how to exit what they have done.
The season ends when the news report starts to detail you can get the database on TOR.
This could be on HBO, Amazon, or Netflix.
the what?
Thanks for mentioning the TV show. I foolishly thought everyboby, even the youngest, would have at least heard about "Dallas". I'm suprised it didn't become an Internet meme.
Ah... well... :)
I'd recruit ex-AM employees. Their business model is brilliant even if is basically illegal! Imagine what they could achieve in an organization with even moderate ethics!
The users? That's another story. I'm checking each applicant against "the list". On the list? We could probably do better in that position.
edit: http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly-wor...