Hardly any women existed on site, reveals study of data.
By Raif Karerat
When the hacker group Impact Team released user information from Ashley Madison in successive deluges of data, they claimed that thousands of women’s profiles with the adultery-enabling service were fake.
Annalee Newitz, a Gawker journalist and editor-in-chief, decided to take it upon herself to delve into the troves on information that were released into the wild in order to determine for herself, and Gizmodo readers, just how many women really were out and about on Ashley Madison.
Newitz easily determined that email addresses ending in an Ashley Madison domain were mostly created by site admins. A comparison of men’s and women’s email addresses revealed that over 9,000 of these ashleymadison.com addresses were used for female profiles, while roughly 1,000 went to men or to profiles where no gender was specified.
Next Newitz checked for patterns in IP addresses. She found 82 percent of accounts created from the IP address 127.0.0.1, known as a loopback interface, of “home,” meaning they were created on a home computer at Ashley Madison. 68,709 of the profiles created with that IP address were female, and the remaining 12,000 were either male or had nothing in the gender field.
“Another weird detail was that the most popular female last name in the database was an extremely unusual one, which matched the name of a woman who worked at the company about ten years ago,” wrote Newitz. “This unusual name had over 350 entries, as if she or someone else was creating a bunch of test accounts.”
Another serious anomaly was determined using timestamps. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. However, only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages.
Also using timestamps, Newitz found 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2,400 women had.
One last disparity in data fields pertained to how many times a member had replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison: 5.9 million men had done it, while only 9,700 women had.
Both the Impact Team and disgruntled users of the website have accused Ashley Madison of partaking in blatant fraud, and the evidence seems to be damning. If the data is to be believed, it would seem that the majority of men who jumped on the Ashley Morgan bandwagon were swindled into paying money to flirt with women who were effectively nonexistent.