Ashley Madison homepage (Photo : Reuters)
A recent analysis of the Ashley Madison hacked data revealed that the cheater website showed little activity from the claimed 5.5 million female members. The report's findings were posted on the Internet's hard-to-access "dark web," implying that the vast majority of women profiles were fake and produced automatically by "bots."
The site's data was evaluated by Gizmodo. In addition to the alleged 5.5 million women members, an estimated 31 million male subscribers exist.
Gizmodo editor Annalee Newitz explained on August 26, Wednesday that a close examination of the female profiles produced some red flags. None of the profiles had communicated with men on the website, or even used the website after making their profile.
Although 20 million men had checked their messages at Ashley Madison, just 1,492 women had done the same thing. The chat system showed similar figures. Gizmodo discovered that while 11 million men had logged on, just 2,409 women had taken that action.
Several of the female profiles' IP addresses also raised a question mark. They linked to the Ashley Madison site itself.
In another odd twist, the most common female last name in the cheating website was "extremely unusual." It matched the family name of a woman the company had employed about a decade ago, according to The Sun Daily.
Gizmodo's report explained that the number of active female users could be estimated by doing some statistical number crunching based on how many women paid money to have their accounts deleted. That figure was slightly over 12,000.
Newitz explained that deleting an account is a sign of activity. However, it is the opposite of the type of erotic encounters the website advertises, which implies that the site's male users were basically paying money for a cheating fantasy, according to The National Business Review.
Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life has offered a $500,000 reward for the arrest of the site's hackers. Last week the cybercriminals leaked user data that included email addresses, telephone numbers, and payment transactions.
The leaked data happened a month after the "Impact Team" stole information from the site. They claimed their goal was to shut down the website.
This video explains the hacking of Ashley Madison:
