99% of 'women' on Ashley Madison didn't use the site at all

The tired old joke that "there are no girls on the internet" is laughed off nowadays - but it seems it might actually be true on Ashley Madison.

The recently-hacked adulterers’ website has had enough headaches with leaking the private details of its members, followed by allegations that they sold a "delete" function that didn’t exist.

Now, it’s alleged almost all the women who used the site were either faked or had never actually used it at all - but were there to reel in paying male members.

Writing for tech site Gizmodo, journalist (and site editor) Annalee Newitz analysed the data from the leak to see if there was any truth to the oft-repeated claims that almost all the female profiles were fake.

’Paying for a fantasy’

"When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy," Newitz writes in her opening.

Of the 37 million members of Ashley Madison, only 5.5 million were female, she reports. Trying to identify which of these are real people and which are not is a tricky business.

After consultation with experts, Newitz decided to trawl the data for email addresses @AshleyMadison.com - company email addresses. She found 10,000 accounts set up with staff email addresses.

Then, she looked at IP addresses - and found 80,000 profiles with an IP address of 127.0.0.1 - a network’s home address. 68,709 of those were women.

Another unusual aspect was that there were over 350 profiles with a "very unusual" last name- one of a staff member who worked there many years ago.

Invisible women

The truly damning evidence, however, was that of the 5.5 million female members of the site, there was information for when they last checked their messages. And Newitz found that only 1,492 women had ever, ever checked their messages.

To back that up, the live chat feature was only ever used by 2,409 women- compared to 11 million men.

And for those who replied to a mail without ever beginning the process? That field showed just 9,700 women had ever responded- and that likely includes automatic "canned" responses from the site, a feature of the message service.

Of course, there still were thousands of genuine female members on Ashley Madison. And there’s no guarantee that the data obtained by hackers was complete and representative - but all the figures point to the same general trend.

Newitz’ full article is a fascinating insight into the actual users of the now-infamous site "where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there."

It’s worth reading in full over on Gizmodo.

- H/T: ’Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site’ on Gizmodo.com & BreakingNews.ie