I would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.