Source – dailymail.co.uk
– A data scientist has uncovered what he says is proof that Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fake accounts to dupe members into paying for its services, in a scheme that would have almost doubled the website’s revenue.
According to statistics seen by Daily Mail Online, 40,000 profiles were set up on the affair site using just six email addresses owned by the website’s operators on two separate days.
It follows claims in previous reports that the extra-marital dating network tried to hide around 100,000 of these so-called ‘engager’ profiles – sometimes referred to as Ashley Angels – from users, so they believed they were talking to real people.
If true, this means the real number of ‘available’ women was drastically reduced, while the website’s monthly revenue was almost doubled by the ‘engagers’, as members have to pay to read their online messages.
A data scientist has uncovered what he believes is proof that the Ashley Madison website (pictured) created tens of thousands of fake accounts to dupe members into paying for their services
Spike in sign-ups: A graph of Ashley Madison membership shows a huge spike of new members on April 10, 2012, and February 2, 2013
Out of 32million members before the website was hacked, 26.5million were men and just 5.5million women.
Around 700,000 of these women are said to have been looking for lesbian affairs. Therefore, if the 100,000 ‘fembots’ are included, there would have been only 4.7million women looking for extramarital relationships with men.
This means there would have been five men for every one woman.
Jeremy Bullock, the chief data scientist at a UK-based technology firm, said he was suspicious of Ashley Madison’s recruitment methods, so searched through the data released by hackers last month looking for anomalies.
He found that on April 10, 2012, 122,766 ‘men’ and 11,923 ‘women’ signed up to the website from an IP address that traced back to Avid Life Media – Ashley Madison’s parent company.
On February 2, 2013, a further 100,092 ‘women’ also signed up.
Looking closely at the data, he found only six email addresses had been used to generate a total of around 40,000 ‘fake’ women. One of these was host@almlabs – another IP address owned by Avid Life Media.
He told Daily Mail Online: ‘Looking at the IP addresses used by these emails, the majority were from localhost.
‘The next largest were from IP address 38.113.163.225 – which has a host name of tor.office.avidlifemedia.com.’
He added: ‘I believe that this data shows that despite Ashley Madison’s protestations to the contrary, member generation was going on at a industrial scale and that there is a clear trail of evidence leading back to the company.’
Although Bullock says he found 40,000 ‘bots’, other media reports suggest the number could be closer to 100,000.
As a result of the supposed scheme, according to Gizmodo, around 80 per cent of new members were sent messages by ‘engagers’ – fake profiles – when they signed up.
‘Engager’ activity: A list of six emails generated almost 40,000 female accounts (listed here as gender 1) with only 55 male (gender 2) accounts
According to documents seen by Daily Mail Online they received generic messages such as ‘are you online’ to create the illusion a woman was trying to start a conversation with them.
However in eight out of ten instances, according to Gizmodo, these women were fake.
These bots would allegedly send messages to millions of members, creating an illusion they were contacting them directly with the aim of arranging a sexual relationship.
This means some members supposedly paid up to $290 to interact with someone who didn’t actually exist.
This has prompted two lawsuits in California and Maryland by men who think they were deliberately deceived.
Other members who contacted the website suggesting they had uncovered the ‘bots’ have asked asking for refunds. It is not known how Ashley Madison responded.
Ashley Madison, which has denied creating the bots, has failed to respond to numerous requests from Daily Mail Online for comment.
According to statistics sent to Daily Mail Online by Twitter user @amlolzz, when the ‘engagers’ were allegedly turned on, the website’s revenue spiked. When they were deactivated it dropped again.
Tricked: The alleged scheme meant 80 per cent of new members supposedly paid up to $290 to interact with someone who didn’t exist, according to Gizmodo. Website founder Noel Biderman (pictured) resigned after the details of its 32million members were hacked and released online
A graph discovered in leaked emails between Avid Life Media chief operating officer Rizwan Jiwan and the former chief executive officer Noel Biderman shows revenues went from $60,000 per month to $110,500 when the bots were used for the first time in 2012.
Avid Life Media has denied it was involved in ‘member generation’ – but data retrieved from the hacked database suggests it was going on.
The website was set up in 2001 by Noel Biderman – who stepped down earlier this month after the emails of its 32million ‘users’ were hacked and leaked on to the internet.
The bots’ accounts – some of which used ashleymadison.com email address – were apparently used because, in comparison to men, a very small number of women signed up to the site.
According to company emails and documents seen by Gizmodo, around 80 per cent of new members’ purchases were for messages with bots.
Identities were allegedly created using old or abandoned accounts from members who had signed up before 2011.
One of the accounts, under the name Sensuous Kitten, was listed as the 11th member of Ashley Madison.
Are “honey traps” real? – By Christopher Beam
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turned himself in to British police on Tuesday after Sweden put out a warrant for his arrest. Assange stands accused of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion” during encounters with two Swedish women. But some Assange defenders are suggesting that the 39-year-old Australian is the victim of government-sponsored seduction, known as a “honey trap.” Are honey traps real, or are they found only in James Bond movies?
Oh, they’re real. Honey traps, also called “honey pots,” have been a favorite spying tactic as long as sex and espionage have existed—in other words, forever. Perhaps the earliest honey trap on record was the betrayal of Samson by Delilah, who revealed Samson’s weakness (his hair) to the Philistines in exchange for 1,100 pieces of silver, as described in the book of Judges. The practice continued into the 20th century and became a staple of Cold War spy craft. Governments around the world set up honey traps to this day, but it’s an especially common practice in Russia and China. The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t comment on whether its agents use their sexuality to obtain information, but current and former intelligence officials say it does happen occasionally.
The classic honey trap is seduction to extract secrets. Perhaps the best-known trap layer was the Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari, who was executed by firing squad in France in 1917 for allegedly passing secrets along to the Germans. Other times, spies set honey traps to draw their victims into their enemy’s clutches. In 1978, undercover Sandinista operative Nora Astorga lured a Nicaraguan general into her bedroom, where assailants slit his throat. When Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu went public with secrets about Israel’s nuclear capabilities in 1986, he fled to London, only to be seduced by a woman who led him to Mossad agents in Rome. (A rabbi later determined that the Mossad’s actions were, in fact, kosher.)
Honey trapping often leads to blackmail—though some of the more famous examples didn’t go according to plan. In one 1957 case, the Soviets recruited an attractive man to seduce legendary (and gay) American columnist Joseph Alsop. When KGB agents tried to blackmail Alsop with compromising photos, he went to the American authorities and told them everything. London Daily Telegraph correspondent Jeremy Wolfenden got similarly ensnared in the 1960s, when the KGB photographed him having sex with another man. Wolfenden told the British embassy, and they asked him to become a double agent. The stress drove him to drink. He died at age 31. When the KGB tried to blackmail Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno with videotapes of the president having sex with Russian women disguised as flight attendants, Sukarno wasn’t upset. He was pleased. He even asked for more copies of the video to show back in his country.
Women, too, have been honey-trap targets. During the Cold War, East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf sent Stasi “Romeo spies” into West Germany to seduce powerful women and extract their secrets.* In the early ’80s, a CIA agent stationed in Ghana fell in love with a man who turned out to be a Ghanaian intelligence officer.
No one has perfected the honey trap quite like the Russians. One former KGB agent has said that the Soviet intelligence agency didn’t ask Russian women to stand up for their country but “asked them to lay down.” One of the biggest Cold War spy cases was that of Clayton Lonetree, a Marine Corps security guard entrapped by a female Soviet officer, then blackmailed into sharing documents. In 1987, he became the first Marine convicted of espionage. Russian spy craft didn’t disappear with the Soviet Union. Russian political satirist Viktor Shenderovich was recently filmed cheating on his wife with a young woman named Katya, who had also seduced a half dozen other Kremlin critics. A similar trap appeared to catch an American diplomat in Moscow in 2009, but the State Department said the evidence was fabricated as part of a smear campaign.* China, too, seems to employ honey traps regularly. When former Deputy Mayor of London Ian Clement was seduced and drugged in his Beijing hotel room in 2009 only to find his BlackBerry stolen the next day, he admitted that he “fell for the oldest trick in the book.”
Christopher Beam is a writer living in Beijing.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/12/the_spy_who_said_she_loved_me.html
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