Ashley Madison date bait issue: Cheating website faked female profiles to attract men?
Cheating website Ashley Madison has yet again made waves with a new allegation that it allowed fake female profiles to proliferate so that it could attract more male subscribers.
The "date bait" allegation comes after Ashley Madison fell victim to a massive data hack last week. Based on the leaked data, the cheating website's claims about its wide base of female user is highly suspicious, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Last week, hackers exposed the personal information of Ashley Madison subscribers and the leaked data show that only 5 million (15 percent) out of the 35 million exposed profiles belonged to female users. The site's CEO Noah Biderman previously boasted that its users have a 70-30 gender split and that there is a 1:1 male-to-female ratio among the users under 30 years of age, the report details.
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The information exposed by the recent data hack may be proof that paid-dating sites manipulate or lie about their user numbers just to lure in more clients.
"Ashley Madison has paid people to write profiles, and they've allowed fake profiles to proliferate on their site," SCMP quotes industry consultant David Evans. "Tons of sites are guilty of that."
Evans has previously done business with Ashley Madison and has monitored online dating sites since 2002, the report adds.
Ryan Pitcher, who has been managing a fake-profile team for dating platform Global Personals, explained that these websites make a lot of money from the date bait scheme. He said there are so many men who are willing to pay a monthly fee of $20 to $30 just to communicate online with the site's "female subscribers," the Independent Online reports.
While dating sites have no problem getting men to sign up, there are only a handful of women who are willing to do the same. This is because of the "misogynist" way that the sites advertise their services, the report explains.
This revelation may further heat up the anger among Ashley Madison's users who are now afraid of being exposed after their personal information was leaked online. Many of them are now demanding that the website that facilitates extramarital affairs be shuttered. Unfortunately, proving the date bait allegations against Ashley Madison would be a very difficult task to accomplish.
