There has been plenty of skepticism regarding the demographics the 37 million users of the dating site in the wake of the scandal-inducing Ashley Madison data dump. The Impact Team hackers group that orchestrated the data release, have accused Ashley Madison of fraud, claiming that around 95 percent of female users are just fembots created by the company. In fact, Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media, was already sued by an employee in 2013 because she claimed her job was to write thousands of fake profiles.
By using the data from the hackers' release, Gizmodo studied user data to check whether hacker group's allegations of bots were true. Based on the evidence that was found, the answer is yes. It might actually be even worse than what the hackers claimed previously. According to the user demographics provided by the dating site, the imbalance was in fact already apparent. According to them out of the 37 million registered users, just 5.5 million were profiles of female users. But further analyzing the data, a grim reality can be found. Out of those 5.5 million female-identified accounts, almost no one had shown any activity after they were created.
Participation from women is even worse when it comes to actual activity. Ashley Madison is allowing for free messages, but requiring members to paid-for credits in order to initiate a custom email message. Within that particular inbox system of the dating site, 20 million men checked their Ashley Madison message inbox but just 1,492 women. Participation in the chat system was still very bleak. About 11 million men used this chat system, where just 2,409 women did the same.
Perhaps the most obvious statistic is found within "paid delete" accounts that Ashley Madison promised to wipe from its service for a $19 fee. However, instead of being deleted for real, they actually ended up on company's servers. From these "deleted" accounts over 173,000 were men and only 12,108 accounts were women.
It seems that the Ashley Madison dating website was, in fact, full of eager men and robotic women. The employees of the site did their best to create fembots acting realistic and to make these profiles just look real as much as possible. However, the numbers reveal that the chance of men engaging in an affair with a real woman on the site was close to none.
