Ashley Madison has long claimed that male and female users are even among those under 30, and that there is a 70/30 male female ratio sitewide — which appears to be completely false. In the massive dump of 35 million records, only 15% of them belonged to women.
“There is, undoubtedly, widespread pseudo profiling and fake messages still going on in the industry,” Ryan Pitcher, who spent two years running a fake-profile team for another website called WhiteLabelDating.com told The Washington Post. “If you don’t have pseudos to try and fulfill the sexual desires of these men … men wouldn’t keep signing up.”
Pitcher maintains that while there is no shortage of men looking for hookups, there is a shortage of women- and the rare ones who sign up are hit with such a massive barrage of men that the site becomes too overwhelming.
“Look at Fling.com or Adult Friend Finder, the two big sex and hook-up sites,” he said. “You know after five minutes that there isn’t a single real woman on there. Somebody like Fling, they make money by BSing everything.”
Until 2014, Ashley Madison even openly had a program called “Ashley’s Angels,” which was explained in the fine print that nobody ever reads. They explained that employees would message men to keep users engaging and monitor their use.
“The purpose of our Ashley’s AngelsTM is to provide entertainment, to allow you to explore our Services and to promote greater participation in our Services. Ashley’s AngelsTM attempt to simulate communications with real members to encourage more conversation and interaction with users. We also use Ashley’s AngelsTM to monitor user communications and use of our Service to measure compliance with the Terms. Further, we may use Ashley’s AngelsTM in connection with our market research to enable us to analyze user preferences, trends, patterns and information about our customer base. Ashley’s AngelsTM are not intended to resemble or mimic any actual persons.”
Emails uncovered in the hack also revealed that former spokeswoman Louise Van der Velde had threatened to go to the media to blow the whistle on their being “really no women” on the site.
