Ashley Madison, ya know, the online cheating site that in July of 2015 leaked confidential information of 37 million dirtbags and bolstered its user base with robot chicks to lure men is still alive and well, or so they say. A bajillion lawsuits and a few suicides from unfaithful dudes later, and Ashley Madison has limped back into the picture like Judas showing up at Jesus’ bachelor party looking for a lap dance.
The cheating site claims it added more than 400,000 global users last month, according to the New York Post. Ashley Madison claims it has signed up 52.7 million users since it was founded 15 years ago. That number is more than 15 million larger than the subscribers it claimed 2015 at the time of the cyberattack. This begs the question: how? Well, conveniently for Ashley Madison, it doesn’t discuss numbers like daily active users for “competitive reasons,” thus giving them immunity to questions about how a company could possibly come out of such an ugly scandal better off.
“Your math is accurate,” says Paul Keable, VP of communications for the site’s new corporate parent, Ruby Life. “In the summer of 2015 we experienced unprecedented media coverage of our business” — and unprecedented signups despite the hacking scare, according to Keable.
“Our monthly new member account additions have not been verified by a third party, but we stand behind them,” Keable insists.
Here’s a reminder of just how shady this company has operated in the past. As Gizmodo points out, in 2015 Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots to send male users fake messages inflate its numbers. When men signed up for new accounts, they’d be messaged by a bot masquerading as an interested woman. The men would then pay a small fee to reply to the bots. A mind-numbing 80 percent of initial purchases were made by a male trying to communicate with a female bot.
Today, in Ashley Madison’s post-scandal era, the company is not only claiming that it has ridded itself of bots, but that the men-women ratio is comparable. VP Paul Keable is touting a 1-to-1 ratio of signups by women and men in New York City. That ratio falls off a bit, to 1.4 men for every woman signing up across the rest of the country, Keable said.
The men who are joining Ashley Madison in 2017 are the same ones who are sending money to a Nigerian prince. Anonymous needs to expose this scam and everyone involved with it.
[h/t NY Post]