On August 24, 2015, the Judiciary Report disputed claims that the Ashley Madison website has over 37,00,000 users (Ashley Madison Website Hack Exposing Adulterers Leads To New Divorce Cases Being Filed). A new report released this week reveals one company owned 40,000 fake female profiles on Ashley Madison and all shared the same 6 email addresses.
As a webmaster and blogger, what caught my eye a month ago is the fact the Ashley Madison site stated they have 1,000,000 unique email addresses of members (even those can be faked to a degree). That gave it away. To only have 1,000,000 unique email addresses means you likely have less than 1,000,000 members. People sometimes have multiple registrations on one site and this accounts for the inflated membership numbers of Ashley Madison.
As for the 40,000 fake female profiles, it was clearly done to entice men to the Ashley Madison site, by flooding it with attractive, available women (or so site users thought). However, such companies will license the images of aspiring foreign models and use them on fake profiles. These fake profiles lure men into thinking they would have adulterous relationships with attractive women they thought were actually interested in them, but were actually a few people paid to interact with many thousands.
Having stated that, some of the adulterous affairs on Ashley Madison were real, conducted by people looking for trouble in breaking their marriage vows. Some of the profiles were also created by male and female prostitutes and escorts. The whole thing is a sordid mess that created a significant amount of damage.
Published: 14:06, 29 September 2015 | Updated: 21:30, 29 September 2015 - A data scientist has uncovered what he says is proof that Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fake accounts to dupe members into paying for its services, in a scheme that would have almost doubled the website's revenue.
According to statistics seen by Daily Mail Online, 40,000 profiles were set up on the affair site using just six email addresses owned by the website's operators on two separate days. It follows claims in previous reports that the extra-marital dating network tried to hide around 100,000 of these so-called 'engager' profiles – sometimes referred to as Ashley Angels - from users, so they believed they were talking to real people.
If true, this means the real number of 'available' women was drastically reduced, while the website's monthly revenue was almost doubled by the 'engagers', as members have to pay to read their online messages...