Days after this look at the Ashley Madison data dump showed that almost no females frequented the site and this look at the Ashley Madison source code shows an effort to create “bots” or software that would pretend to be women, comes this press release that had a few interesting tidbits:
Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated. The company continues its day-to-day operations even as it deals with the theft of its private data by criminal hackers. Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing. This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform – including 87,596 women.
Some journalists have turned the focus of the criminal act against Ashley Madison inside out, attacking us instead of the hackers. Last week, a reporter who claimed to analyze the stolen data made incorrect assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data. This reporter concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on those assumptions. That conclusion was wrong.
Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform. Furthermore, in the first half of this year the ratio of male members who paid to communicate with women on our service versus the number of female members who actively used their account (female members are not required to pay to communicate with men on Ashley Madison) was 1.2 to 1. These numbers are the main reason that Ashley Madison is the number one service for people seeking discreet relationships.
Okay. Except that anything said in this press release is unverifiable because they are a private company who doesn’t have to produce proof about anything they say. So I take this statement with a grain of salt. Besides, if Ashley Madison did have fake women on the site and an army of “bots” to make it look like there were women on the site, that would be fraud on a massive scale. And the last time I checked, fraud was illegal. Thus the need to make some sort of statement to introduce some degree of uncertainty. What seems to make this plausible is the fact that this leaked e-mail from the last Ashley Madison data dump shows how much money they were making off of “bots.”
It looks like to me that Ashely Madison is circling the drain at the moment.
