The Ashley Madison bots

Gizmodo has looked even closer at the data from Ashley Madison, and it turns out that not only were they very few women, many of them were bots.

In a summary they have found:

• 70,000 female bots would take over accounts created by staff, and “chat” to men
• The bots sent 20,269,675 messages to men and 1,492 to women
• There were 70,529 female bots and 43 male ones
• Around two thirds of male users were messaged by a bot and one third chatted up by one
• At first the bots tried chatting up gay men and had to be programmed to ignore them!
• There were special bots who would chat to those who paid $250 for a “guaranteed affair”. Once they paid, they were passed to an “affiliate”, probably an escort.
• Engineers actually looked at a system where women would get paid a commission for getting men to buy credits to talk to them
• The bots could speak 31 different languages

So really the website was a giant fraud. While the data hack was despicable in that it revealed individual’s data, it has exposed that the website was basically a scam. Not media gave the company masses amount of free publicity, based on the company’s own claims. Perhaps there is a lesson that media should never just promote a company that claims they are successful, without verifying it.

It will be interesting to see if the executives are prosecuted for fraud. There would seem to be a pretty good case for it.