I love irony and poetic justice. The recent turmoil surrounding infidelity website Ashley Madison has plenty of both.
I can only imagine the panic users of the site—which sports the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair.”—must have felt when hackers stole Ashley Madison’s data and threatened to out its clients if Avid Life Media, the parent company did not shut the site down.
The hackers, who called themselves the “Impact Team” made good on the threat by dumping the client list on the “dark web.” For the uninitiated, as I must admit I was before this story, the dark web is like a parallel Internet hidden behind a bunch of encryption where all kinds of nefarious activity takes place.
In fact, it’s much more complicated than that and much less so. In fact, it is easily accessible to anyone just by running the same encryption software and there is just as much legitimate activity as there is on the regular web just as there is copious illegal stuff on the regular web as there is on the dark web.
In any event, stealing a company’s data is a crime, which in this case led to the unveiling what could well be another crime, fraud.
As it turns out, many of the women clients may not have existed at all. Men were the predominant users of the site to begin with. Of the 37 million purported users of the site, 31 million were male.
Once the Ashley Madison data was published, Annalee Newitz, an employee of the tech site Gizmodo, did an extensive analysis that appears to indicated even the 5.5 million women clients the company claimed was probably inflated by fake accounts.
For example, she found more than 68,000 allegedly female users had loopback (i.e., inside the company) I.P. addresses compared to just 12,000 male clients.
Furthermore, while 20 million male users checked their message box, only 1,492 females did. And of more than 11 million clients who used the chat system just over 2,400 of them were women.
“When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs,” Newitz wrote. “They were paying for a fantasy.”
The idea the site may have been largely a scam seems to be borne out by other evidence such as a lawsuit by a Brazilian woman who claims to have been paid to create 1,000 fake accounts for the website.
So, the people, by and large men, who were trying to cheat never had much of a chance and the company that was claiming to enable the cheating were the cheaters.
While news of the leak may have led to some sleepless nights for would-be cheaters, A Chicago Tribune analysis indicated most would never be found out based on the nature of the data.
Ultimately there could not have been much actual cheating going on depending on how you define it.
Growing up Catholic we were always told it is not just the immoral act that is a sin, but even thinking about it is.
In law, one must have both acted and intended to act. I don’t know very many spouses who would adhere to that threshold of guilt or innocence.
Perhaps this close call with exposure will be cause for some soul-searching both on the part of the system’s users and its creators.
