Ashley Madison the dating website specifically targeted towards adulterers, utilized the services of robots, who the users thought were seductive females, to provide the illusion of interaction with human females, consequently boosting the popularity of the site.
The dating site made no pretext of its standing as the go-to place for philanderers looking for some action, as its tagline clearly stated, “Life is short. Have an affair.”
The big snag was the extreme scarcity of females on the site, which made the handlers of the platform resort to creating some of their own – the robotic kind.
Computer-generated phony profiles were used as bait to snare non-paying users, who had to pay in order to get chat time with the seemingly eager women.
Avid Life Media, the parent company of the extramarital affairs, admitted to being investigated by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a Reuters interview.
A massive data breach in August 2015 exposed the personal information of 37 million users. In October 2015, David Poyet, an ex-user of the online cheating site, sued Avid Life Media and Avid Life Dating dba Ashley Madison in a federal class action for what he termed the massive use of “fembots” by the cheating site.
In his own words, Mr. Poyet claims over 70,000 so-called females on the site were not human, and the site created profiles of “imaginary women” who were supposedly interested in men.
