An investigation of the site's user database found that there were 31 million profiles for men. However, only 20 million male "users" ever bothered to check their Ashley Madison message box even once, and only 11 million male users ever engaged the website's chat function, even once. A lot of people clearly just signed up out of curiosity.
The database also shows that there were 5.5 million women on Ashley Madison-but when reporter Annalee Newitz drilled down into their user profiles, an astonishing number of these women appear to be fakes-that is, dummy accounts created by the Ashley Madison staff to make it look like there was a pool of women looking for action. And by "astonishing," I mean that it looks like the number of real, live women using the site was somewhere between 1,500 and 10,000.
Which suggests that Ashley Madison might have been the greatest internet scam, ever. They suckered a couple million guys into paying a boatload of money to have affairs with women who were nothing more than sockpuppets of Ashley Madison employees.
Hah!
I've certainly noted this issue for more conventional dating websites (in Home Front, of course). But I was never fooled that hot 27-year-old women who indicated an interest in me were real people.
I find that there were no more than 10,000 women in the cheating pool to be hilarious. And since there were a couple million men (thanks for the reputation boost, guys!), perhaps it is understandable that the men who did connect discovered their "dates" to be so tired looking.
