When hacker mathematical group Impact Team release the Ashley Madison datum , they assert that “ thousands ” of the women ’s profiles were bogus . Later , this numbergot blown up in news storiesthat asserted“90 - 95 % ” of them were fake , though nobody put forth any grounds for such an tremendous figure . So I download the datum and canvas it to get out how many existent women were using Ashley Madison , and who they were .
What I discovered was that the earthly concern of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian seat than anyone had see . This is n’t a dissipated wonderland of men jockey on their wives . It is n’t even a sadscape of 31 million military personnel contend to attract those 5.5 million women in the database . Instead , it ’s like a science fabricated hereafter where every woman on Earth is idle , and some Dilbert - similar engineer has supplant them with gravely - designed robots .
Those 1000000 of Ashley Madison men were compensate to hook up with women who appear to have created profile and then simply vanish . Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins , or just user detritus ? 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 internet site , or even used the site at all after creating a visibility . really , engrave that . As I ’ll explain below , there ’s a upright chance that about 12,000 of the visibility out of millions belonged to actual , real women who were fighting exploiter of Ashley Madison .
When you reckon at the evidence , it ’s hard to refuse that the overwhelming bulk of Isle of Man using Ashley Madison were n’t having affair . They were paying for a fantasy .
The Evidence Mounts
Nobody gainsay the dramatic gender disparity in the Ashley Madison drug user basis , including the society itself . 5.5 million profile are set “ female ” in a database of roughly 37 million mass .
It ’s also a matter of public phonograph recording that some part of the profile are less than real . A few years ago , a former employee of Ashley Madison sued the society in Canada over her dreadful work conditions . She lay claim that she ’d gotten repetitious stress injuries in her hands after the company hire her to create 1,000 fake profile of cleaning woman in three month , written in Portuguese , to attract a Brazilian audience . The character was settled out of motor hotel , and Ashley Madison claimed that the fair sex never made any fake profile .
Still , there isa clause in the Ashley Madison terms of servicethat notes that “ some ” hoi polloi are using the web site purely “ for entertainment ” and that they are “ not seeking in individual meetings with anyone they fit on the Service , but turn over their communications with users and Members to be for their entertainment . ” The site stops short of saying these are fake people , but does admit that many profile are for “ amusement only . ”
base on this evidence , we ’ve get some clear reading that many of the profiles are fake . To find out how many , though , we have to dip into the society ’s non - public information , contained in the information dumps .
The enquiry is , how do you find impostor in a ocean of information ? Answering that becomes more hard when you consider that even real user of Ashley Madison were probably giving fake information at least some of the clip . But sweeping fakery still go out its trace in the profile data . I talk with a data scientist who studies populations , who told me to equate the male and female profile in totality , and expect for anomalous pattern .
My depth psychology had to be entirely found on the profiles themselves , not the credit card information . There is no such thing as a “ paid account ” for women because womanhood do n’t have to pay for anything on Ashley Madison . As a resolution , I could n’t use “ paid story ” as a proxy for “ tangible , ” the way analyst have done with the manlike data . Plus , the citation card data does not name sex — so it would have been impossible to be certain of sexuality ratios in the credit wit information anyway .
In the profile database , each Ashley Madison member has a number of data fields , include obvious things like moniker , gender , birthday , and routine - ons ; but the penis visibility also contain data that is strictly for administrative use , like the email address used to make the account statement , and when the person last checked their Ashley Madison inbox .
I set about my search in an obvious property . Were there any patterns in the personal email speech that people list when they signed up ? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating false profiles , I would apply ashleymadison.com for the email computer address because it ’s easy and obvious . No real Ashley Madison client would have an Ashley Madison company email . So I searched for any email destination that ended in ashleymadison.com . Bingo . There were about 10 thousand account with ashleymadison.com email destination . Many of them sounded like they ’d been generated by a bot , like the dozens of addresses listed as[email protected],[email protected ] , 300@ashleymadison , and so on .
A immediate comparison of humans ’s and womanhood ’s email addresses reveal that over 9 thousand of these ashleymadison.com address were used for female profiles , while roughly 1000 pass to men or to profiles where no sexuality was specified .
This pattern was telling , but not damning . What it suggests is that the absolute majority of patently faux account — ones perhaps make by bored admins using their companionship ’s email address , or mayhap substantial women using faux entropy — were marked female . These fake number in the thou , which is exactly what Impact Team suggested .
Next I see for patterns in IP reference , which can bring out the location of the computers people used to open their accounts . The most democratic IP address among men and women belonged to a party called OnX , which host Ashley Madison ’s backups . That could mean a number of things , including that those were all accounts created by citizenry make for at Ashley Madison . It could also think of that there was a aggregative migration of data at some full point and everybody ’s IP reference was change to Ashley Madison ’s host address . There were no weird gender anomalies in this datum , though — about 82 per centum of these OnX IP destination belonged to men , which is cheeseparing to the percentage of men in the database .
But the 2nd most democratic IP computer address , regain in 80,805 profiles , was a dissimilar tale . This IP address , 127.0.0.1 , is well - known to anyone who process with computer systems as a loopback interface . To the relief of us , it ’s known only as “ home , ” your local figurer . Any bill with that IP address was likely create on a “ home ” electronic computer at Ashley Madison . Interestingly , 68,709 of the visibility produce with that IP address were distaff , and the stay 12,000 were either manful or had nothing in the gender field .
That ’s a vast disparity . In a database of 85 % gentleman , you ’d expect any IP address to belong to about 85 % men . So it ’s singular to discover that about 82 % of the accounts created from a “ nursing home ” IP reference are female . This strengthen the pattern I ’d already control with the ashleymadison.com email address — plain bogus accounting were irresistibly distaff , and number in the ten of M .
Another unearthly detail was that the most democratic distaff last name in the database was an passing strange one , which matched the name of a charwoman who worked at the companionship about ten years ago . This unusual name had over 350 entry , as if she or someone else was make a cluster of test accounts . The most democratic virile name , on the other hand , was Smith , followed by Jones . This equate typical name distribution in the North American population .
That said , I also found millions of unique IP addresses and email among the char , just as there were among the men . That ’s precisely what you ’d gestate from a random batch of 37 million people . I also saw data for man and women in the “ birthday ” theatre that look absolutely normal for a very different reason : both gender had obviously fake giving birth dates . Two - third base of man and women claimed their birthdays fell in January . This is a standard sign of people pick the first month that pop up up in the drop - down carte du jour . The actual population has birthdays falling fairly evenly during all month , with uptick in summer and September . But the online population , satiate out forms on a sex website ? Their birthdays tend to clump around the easiest month to nibble on a cast , and this kind of fakery is really a sign of humanness .
Again and again , the distaff profile showed patterns that suggested a disproportionate numeral of them were false accounts or trial run accounts . Still , the number were only in the tens of thousands . And a deal of the other information looked relatively normal .
Where the Women Aren’t
Then , three datum fields shift everything . The first field , called mail_last_time , contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member arrest the subject matter in their Ashley Madison inbox . If a individual never check their inbox , the field was blank . But even if they ’d control their messages only once , the theater of operations contain a date and time . About two - thirds of the men , or 20.2 million of them , had check the substance in their accounts at least once . But only 1,492 adult female had ever checked their messages . It was a serious anomalousness .
The pattern was reflected in another data point 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 organisation . some 11 million work force had engaged in chat , but only 2400 char had .
Yet another field , reply_mail_last_time , showed a like disparity . This field contained the sentence when a member had last reply to a content from another person on Ashley Madison . 5.9 million men had done it , and only 9700 women had .
What all these field of operation have in vernacular is that they measure user activity . They show what happen after the account visibility was make , and how an actual person used it by checking messages , chatting , or answer to messages . They measure what you might call key signature of real human behavior . Only a paltry number of women ’s accounts really look human .
But what about that ostensibly rummy disparity between the issue of woman ensure messages ( 1492 ) , and replying to message ( 9700 ) ? Even that can be explained by looking at how genuine world employ Ashley Madison .
When you log into your Ashley Madison account statement , you ’re prompted to answer message before you visit your inbox . A dialog box pops up , suggesting that you answer to all your content in volume , with a canned reply like “ I only answer to full message , ” or “ Please institutionalise me a subject matter and photo . ” In other actor’s line , you may reply to several mails at the same meter without ever in reality fit or open your ring armor . So it ’s soft to imagine that perhaps a few thousand real char had accounts , and reply to almost 10 thousand messages after being prompted . But only about 1500 of them ever click the button to give their inboxes .
Both the Impact Team and disgruntled user of Ashley Madison have called the site fraudulent , mostly because the company point man to shut down their account — and then actually kept their information . I found ample grounds of this kind of fraud in the database . There were 173,838 men ’s accounts with the email savoir-faire listed as , and 12,108 women ’s chronicle . All other data in those explanation had been retained .
It ’s deserving mark that those 12,108women ’s accounts may defend the only dependable number we ’ve got for adult female who used the website . After all , make up to delete an account is a certain sign of bodily process , though of class it ’s evidence of pullout rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised .
Overall , the characterisation is grim indeed . Out of 5.5 million female accounts , rough zero per centum had ever shew any form of activity at all , after the day they were create .
The men ’s report tell a story of merry interlocking with the site , with over 20 million men hopefully wait at their inboxes , and over 10 million of them start confab . The women ’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there .
for sure , some of these inactive report were in all likelihood created by tangible , live adult female ( or men pretending to be fair sex ) who were curious to see what the site was about . Some probably wanted to find their cheating hubby . Others were no doubt rummy journalists like me . But they were still overwhelmingly inactive . They were not created by women wanting to hook up with marital man . They were static profile full of dead datum , whose sole purpose was to make men think that jillion of women were active on Ashley Madison .
There are definitely other possible explanations for these datum discrepancies . It could be that the women ’s data in these three field just befall to get dispiritedly spoil , even though the men ’s data did n’t . Or maybe most of those account were n’t designedly faked , but just be real fair sex who come to the web site once , never to return .
Either way , we ’re provide with information that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of trillion of men write mail , chit-chat , and spend money for woman who are n’t there .
Art by Tara Jacoby
Thanks to Carlos Aguilar and Josh Laurito for tips and help analyzing the Ashley Madison dataset.
Correction 8/29 : The article originally stated that birthday are equally spread throughout the year . In fact , there are more birthdays in summer and September , and the article has been corrected to muse this .
reach out to the generator at[email protected].Public PGP keyPGP fingerprint : 85E3 8F69 046B 44C1 EC9F B07B 76D7 8F05 00D0 26C4
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