[Infowarrior] - Ashley Madison admits using fembots to lure men into spending money

[Richard Forno]

Ashley Madison admits using fembots to lure men into spending money

The hookup site for cheaters admits its mistakes and tries to rebrand.

by Annalee Newitz - Jul 8, 2016 12:27pm EDT

After nearly a year of radio silence, the infidelity hookup site Ashley Madison has finally released a statement about what's next for the company. Among other things, the company's new executive team admits that it used fembots to lure men into paying to join the site, which promised the men discreet affairs with willing women.

In fall 2015, Ashley Madison made headlines when a hacker or hackers known as Impact Team released massive data dumps from the company's source code, member databases, and then-CEO Noel Biderman's e-mail. The member database contained the names of 34 thousand people trying to have extra-marital affairs, and the revelations induced at least one man to commit suicide. In the wake of the data breach, a number of people have filed lawsuits against the company, and the company is currently under investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission.

Last year, as part of an investigation into the data dump, I published a series of articles at Gizmodo exposing how the company used female chatbots called "hosts" or "engagers" to trick men into paying for Ashley Madison's services. The scam was simple: when a man signed up for a free account, he almost immediately got a chat or private message from a "woman" whose profile showed a few sexy pictures. To reply to his new lady friend, the man had to pay for an account. In reality, that lady was a few lines of PHP code.

In internal e-mails, company executives shared documents that showed more than three-quarters of all paying customers had been converted by a fembot, referred to as a "host." There were more than 70 thousand of these fembot accounts, created in dozens of languages by data entry workers.  The workers were told to populate these accounts with fake information and real photos posted by women who had shut down their accounts on Ashley Madison or other properties owned by Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media.

< - >

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/ashley-madison-admits-using-fembots-to-lure-men-into-spending-money/

--
It's better to burn out than fade away.