When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.
What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.
Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.
When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.
The Evidence Mounts
Nobody disputed the dramatic gender disparity in the Ashley Madison user base, including the company itself. 5.5 million profiles are marked “female” in a database of roughly 37 million people.
It’s also a matter of public record that some percentage of the profiles are less than real. A few years ago, a former employee of Ashley Madison sued the company in Canada over her terrible work conditions. She claimed that she’d gotten repetitive stress injuries in her hands after the company hired her to create 1,000 fake profiles of women in three months, written in Portuguese, to attract a Brazilian audience. The case was settled out of court, and Ashley Madison claimed that the woman never made any fake profiles.
Still, there is a clause in the Ashley Madison terms of service that notes that “some” people are using the site purely “for entertainment” and that they are “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” The site stops short of saying these are fake people, but does admit that many profiles are for “amusement only.”
Based on this evidence, we’ve got some clear indications that many of the profiles are fake. To find out how many, though, we have to dip into the company’s non-public information, contained in the data dumps.
The question is, how do you find fakes in a sea of data? Answering that becomes more difficult when you consider that even real users of Ashley Madison were probably giving fake information at least some of the time. But wholesale fakery still leaves its traces in the profile data. I spoke with a data scientist who studies populations, who told me to compare the male and female profiles in aggregate, and look for anomalous patterns.
My analysis had to be entirely based on the profiles themselves, not the credit card data. There is no such thing as a “paid account” for women because women don’t have to pay for anything on Ashley Madison. As a result, I couldn’t use “paid account” as a proxy for “real,” the way analysts have done with the male data. Plus, the credit card data does not list gender — so it would have been impossible to be certain of gender ratios in the credit card information anyway.
In the profile database, each Ashley Madison member has a number of data fields, including obvious things like nickname, gender, birthday, and turn-ons; but the member profile also contains data that is purely for administrative use, like the email address used to create the account, and when the person last checked their Ashley Madison inbox.
I started my search in an obvious place. Were there any patterns in the personal email addresses that people listed when they signed up? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating fake profiles, I would use ashleymadison.com for the email addresses because it’s easy and obvious. No real Ashley Madison customer would have an Ashley Madison company email. So I searched for any email address that ended in ashleymadison.com. Bingo. There were about 10 thousand accounts with ashleymadison.com email addresses. Many of them sounded like they’d been generated by a bot, like the dozens of addresses listed as 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, 300@ashleymadison, and so on.
A quick comparison of men’s and women’s email addresses revealed that over 9 thousand of these ashleymadison.com addresses were used for female profiles, while roughly 1000 went to men or to profiles where no gender was specified.
This pattern was telling, but not damning. What it suggests is that the majority of obviously fake accounts — ones perhaps created by bored admins using their company’s email address, or maybe real women using fake information — were marked female. These fakes numbered in the thousands, which is exactly what Impact Team suggested.
Next I looked for patterns in IP addresses, which can reveal the location of the computers people used to open their accounts. The most popular IP address among men and women belonged to a company called OnX, which hosted Ashley Madison’s backups. That could mean a number of things, including that those were all accounts created by people working at Ashley Madison. It could also mean that there was a mass migration of data at some point and everybody’s IP address was changed to Ashley Madison’s host address. There were no weird gender anomalies in this data, though — about 82 percent of these OnX IP addresses belonged to men, which is close to the percentage of men in the database.
But the second most popular IP address, found in 80,805 profiles, was a different story. This IP address, 127.0.0.1, is well-known to anyone who works with computer systems as a loopback interface. To the rest of us, it’s known simply as “home,” your local computer. Any account with that IP address was likely created on a “home” computer at Ashley Madison. Interestingly, 68,709 of the profiles created with that IP address were female, and the remaining 12,000 were either male or had nothing in the gender field.
That’s a huge disparity. In a database of 85% men, you’d expect any IP address to belong to about 85% men. So it’s remarkable to discover that about 82% of the accounts created from a “home” IP address are female. This strengthened the pattern I’d already seen with the ashleymadison.com email addresses — obviously fake accounts were overwhelmingly female, and numbered in the tens of thousands.
Another weird detail was that the most popular female last name in the database was an extremely unusual one, which matched the name of a woman who worked at the company about ten years ago. This unusual name had over 350 entries, as if she or someone else was creating a bunch of test accounts. The most popular male name, on the other hand, was Smith, followed by Jones. This matches typical name distribution in the North American population.
That said, I also found millions of unique IP addresses and emails among the women, just as there were among the men. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a random batch of 37 million people. I also saw data for men and women in the “birthday” field that looked perfectly normal for a very different reason: both genders had obviously fake birth dates. Two-thirds of men and women claimed their birthdays fell in January. This is a standard sign of people picking the first month that pops up in the drop-down menu. Obviously, the actual population has birthdays falling fairly evenly during all months. But the online population, filling out forms on a sex site? Their birthdays tend to clump around the easiest month to pick on a form, and this kind of fakery is actually a sign of humanness.
Again and again, the female profiles showed patterns that suggested a disproportionate number of them were fake accounts or test accounts. Still, the numbers were only in the tens of thousands. And a lot of the other data looked relatively normal.
Where the Women Aren’t
Then, three data fields changed everything. The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.
The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.
Yet another field, reply_mail_last_time, showed a similar disparity. This field contained the time when a member had last replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison. 5.9 million men had done it, and only 9700 women had.
What all these fields have in common is that they measure user activity. They show what happened after the account profile was created, and how an actual person used it by checking messages, chatting, or replying to messages. They measure what you might call signatures of real human behavior. Only a paltry number of women’s accounts actually looked human.
But what about that seemingly odd disparity between the numbers of women checking messages (1492), and replying to messages (9700)? Even that can be explained by looking at how actual humans use Ashley Madison.
When you log into your Ashley Madison account, you’re prompted to answer messages before you visit your inbox. A dialog box pops up, suggesting that you reply to all your messages in bulk, with a canned reply like “I only reply to full messages,” or “Please send me a message and photo.” In other words, you can reply to several mails at the same time without ever actually checking or opening your mail. So it’s easy to imagine that perhaps a few thousand real women had accounts, and replied to almost 10 thousand messages after being prompted. But only about 1500 of them ever clicked the button to open their inboxes.
Both the Impact Team and disgruntled users of Ashley Madison have called the site fraudulent, mostly because the company charged men to shut down their accounts — and then actually kept their data. I found ample evidence of this kind of fraud in the database. There were 173,838 men’s accounts with the email address listed as <paid_delete>, and 12,108 women’s accounts. All other data in those accounts had been retained.
It’s worth noting that those 12,108 <paid_delete> women’s accounts may represent the only true number we’ve got for women who used the site. After all, paying to delete an account is a sure sign of activity, though of course it’s evidence of disengagement rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised.
Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.
The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.
Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy. The women’s personal email addresses and IP addresses showed marked signs of fakery. And as for the women’s user activity, the fundamental sign of life online? Ashley Madison employees didn’t even bother faking that at all.
There are definitely other possible explanations for these data discrepancies. It could be that the women’s data in these three fields just happened to get hopelessly corrupted, even though the men’s data didn’t. Or maybe most of those accounts weren’t deliberately faked, but just represented real women who came to the site once, never to return.
Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.
I'm don't like the hacking at all but this is fascinating to me, assuming it's all true. I'm not surprised that the number of women would be quite low (although near-zero surprises me) and I'd love to see analyses like this of all of these dating/other sites. For a variety of reasons, I've always wondered just how many women actively use these sites.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
This is crazy. Less than 5,000 actually women and 20 million men. Regardless of the hacking issues...what does this say about men? I expected AM to be mostly men but this is a much larger disparity than I expected.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me. You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being wilfilly ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
I'm don't like the hacking at all but this is fascinating to me, assuming it's all true. I'm not surprised that the number of women would be quite low (although near-zero surprises me) and I'd love to see analyses like this of all of these dating/other sites. For a variety of reasons, I've always wondered just how many women actively use these sites.
It's totally anecdotal, but I personally have a few friends who have used dating sites and I know a few couples who met through a dating site. So I suspect that you wouldn't find the same disparity on dating sites as we're seeing w/ AM. There may be a disparity - just not quite to this degree.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me.You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being willfully ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
Exactly to the bolded. I'd be furious and incredibly hurt if my H had an AM account.
I'm don't like the hacking at all but this is fascinating to me, assuming it's all true. I'm not surprised that the number of women would be quite low (although near-zero surprises me) and I'd love to see analyses like this of all of these dating/other sites. For a variety of reasons, I've always wondered just how many women actively use these sites.
It's totally anecdotal, but I personally have a few friends who have used dating sites and I know a few couples who met through a dating site. So I suspect that you wouldn't find the same disparity on dating sites as we're seeing w/ AM. There may be a disparity - just not quite to this degree.
I'm sure there is a smaller disparity on the more mainstream sites, but I would love to know how large that disparity is overall and how many supposedly female accounts are fake.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me. You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being willfully ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
Oh, if it were my husband, it would be an issue, don't get me wrong!!! But I'm saying for strangers or public figures whose email addresses were found in the database, we ought to be careful about drawing conclusions.
Except Josh Duggar because we already know he's a cheating cheater who cheats. And molests children.
This data makes me wonder how the lawsuit is going to be against AM. Wonder if they will get charged with fraud? Like someone else mentioned, I wonder if other dating sites are loaded with fake accounts too.
Regular dating sites lead to many more actual dates and relationships, though. According to Aziz Ansari, anyway. I just listened to "Modern Romance" and it was pretty interesting on the topic of dating sites, Tinder, and stuff like that. I don't think match.com could get away with being entirely fake on the female side.
I'm don't like the hacking at all but this is fascinating to me, assuming it's all true. I'm not surprised that the number of women would be quite low (although near-zero surprises me) and I'd love to see analyses like this of all of these dating/other sites. For a variety of reasons, I've always wondered just how many women actively use these sites.
It's totally anecdotal, but I personally have a few friends who have used dating sites and I know a few couples who met through a dating site. So I suspect that you wouldn't find the same disparity on dating sites as we're seeing w/ AM. There may be a disparity - just not quite to this degree.
I agree. Match.com and other places rely on success stories and word of mouth as part of their advertising. They can do this because there is nothing wrong with the service they are offering. AM has been able to get away with this shit because what exactly are these men going to do about it? They can't tell anyone, and they aren't exactly sympathetic.
Regular dating sites lead to many more actual dates and relationships, though. According to Aziz Ansari, anyway. I just listened to "Modern Romance" and it was pretty interesting on the topic of dating sites, Tinder, and stuff like that. I don't think match.com could get away with being entirely fake on the female side.
I picked up that book the other day after you mentioned it. Dude is hilarious.
I was sort of surprised that it was a serious, non-fiction, well researched book, but it was really interesting! I'm glad I don't have to navigate dating - it seems complicated. But if I was dating, I'd be internet dating for sure.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me. You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being wilfilly ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
That was actually said by a poster on ML. Her H's email popped up in the AM hack and he was all, "I heard about it on Howard Stern and had to see what it was about, so I signed up with my actual email address." And she believes him and thinks the whole thing is funny because he is too stupid to cheat. I personally don't believe his story because I too have been cheated on and am a suspicious person. Even if his story IS true, though, I would probably still divorce for a-listening to Howard Stern and b-being too stupid to use a fake email.
Also I guess this is where I confess I signed up for farmersonly.com (using a throwaway email) because I had seen those commercials one too many times and was dying to know if people really were looking for farm love. H knows about this though, because we'll randomly start singing to each other "you don't have to be lonely! At farmers only dot com!"
I met my H on Match. He mentioned one time that there were more men on there than women, which a basic search confirmed. I think it capped the results at 1,000 for men but I didn't meet that number when searching for women.
I did encounter a few marrieds. I was surprised how open they were about it.
Post by stephreloaded on Aug 27, 2015 10:34:09 GMT -5
This is actually very interesting. I was expecting to be a disparity but not quite like this. I was aware that there were some dating sites that created fake accounts but the amount in AM is just too much.
I smell multiple lawsuits- both for the privacy issues, fraud on account of creating fake profiles, and fraud for not actually deleting info when users had paid to have it deleted.
Also I guess this is where I confess I signed up for farmersonly.com (using a throwaway email) because I had seen those commercials one too many times and was dying to know if people really were looking for farm love. H knows about this though, because we'll randomly start singing to each other "you don't have to be lonely! At farmers only dot com!"
Right!? Every time I see this commercial I think "Huh, there really is that much of a demand for farmer dating that they have a specific site and it's apparently successful enough to run nation wide commercials?" Who knew?
Post by lyssbobiss, Command, B613 on Aug 27, 2015 10:59:37 GMT -5
So, this begs the question - AM had some sort of "guarantee" you could pay for that came out in the wake of Josh Duggar's stuff - like you were guaranteed an affair and if you didn't have one within so many months you'd get your money back, so if there were so few active women on the site, how would almost anyone be guaranteed success on the site? It seems like AM would've been refunding a lot of money, or hoping no one asked for it back, or had some kind of list of rules you had to follow to get the money back? Like if you didn't meet anyone on there but slept with a coworker instead, no refund for you! I dunno, how was anyone a satisfied customer?
"This prick is asking for someone here to bring him to task Somebody give me some dirt on this vacuous mass so we can at last unmask him I'll pull the trigger on it, someone load the gun and cock it While we were all watching, he got Washington in his pocket."
Was the guarantee just for online personal interaction, or was it for an in person meeting? If in person, I wouldn't be surprised if they hired escorts for those men.
Also I guess this is where I confess I signed up for farmersonly.com (using a throwaway email) because I had seen those commercials one too many times and was dying to know if people really were looking for farm love. H knows about this though, because we'll randomly start singing to each other "you don't have to be lonely! At farmers only dot com!"
H and I will both occasionally look through the Craig's List casual encounters section. Some of the posts there are wildly entertaining (just don't click on anything with a image included!), and will even sometimes point out a particularly funny post to the other. We are also full disclosure about that sort of thing.
I think the problem stems from signing up for it, and then hiding it from your spouse. It signifies there are other problems in the relationship if you are keeping it a secret. You may not be intending to cheat when you sign up, or perhaps you are but aren't willing to admit it to yourself yet. But even if you just want to look around and see what it's all about, you are purposely opening yourself up to the possibility of cheating. We all know what happens when you find something there that eventually piques your curiosity.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me. You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being willfully ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
Yeah when I read the thing about how using AM was like paying for a fantasy, it actually made me wonder if I'd be MORE upset about an AM account than a affair taking place offline with no money paid. The intent/desire to cheat PLUS spending money on it would really be a lot to deal with. Just speculating on how I would feel in that position, but I really doubt I'd be laughing it off or buying some BS story.
This is another reason why I think we should be careful with the witch hunting. Just because someone signed up for AM doesn't mean they actually cheated on their spouse.
But intent to cheat -- by paying money -- is just as damning to me. You wanted to and you tried. If I were married this would be a discussion point.
Also as someone in the dating world it has been shocking(??) to me the number of married men on match.com etc. Some dudes are trying hard to fuck around. I think a few women are being willfully ignorant when they say OH not MY husband he is too stupid, doesn't have enough time/too shy. Stupid, shy and/or busy men fuck around too.
Totally valid, but like others have pointed out at other times, there are also valid, or at least not damning reasons to have an AM account. Not a PAID account, but just an email log in. Creating an account one night after drinking, maybe even with friends around, just to see how stupid and desperate men actually are. Sociological or journalistic research. Creating the account prior to dating or getting married.
Having an account isn't evidence of cheating and isn't even evidence of intention to cheat. Of course, NOT having an Ashley Madison account also isn't proof of innocence.
I smell multiple lawsuits- both for the privacy issues, fraud on account of creating fake profiles, and fraud for not actually deleting info when users had paid to have it deleted.
Lots of lawsuits have been filed already.
But the terms of service include an arbitration agreement and a class action waiver (yes, I just checked this right now LOL), so there will be little to no recourse for anyone who was defrauded. Arguably, I'd say the only ones defrauded where the ones who paid to have their data erased and it was not. Whatever you think of the cheaters, I would say this is a disgusting move by the company to lie so brazenly. Of course, that doesn't mean someone creative couldn't put together a compelling argument for fraud on the basis of the fact that so many of the female profiles were fake.