Leaked data shows that most of Ashley Madison’s female users are bots

No matter how hard companies try to diversify their userbase, dating services are pretty much guaranteed to have an overwhelmingly male userbase. Ashley Madison isn’t any different, it seems, as some information that was released in the recent post-hack data dump reveals that somewhere around 90-95% of the service’s female users are actually bots that were created by the company itself. At least, that’s what the hackers are claiming, but a quick analysis of the leaked data shows that the claim is more or less true.

In the wake of the scandal-inducing Ashley Madison data dump, there has been plenty of skepticism regarding the demographics of the site’s 37 million users. The hackers who orchestrated the dump, Impact Team, have accused Ashley Madison of fraud and claimed 90 to 95 percent of female users are robots created by the company. Ashley Madison and its parent company, Avid Life Media, was also sued by an employee in 2013 who claimed her role was to write thousands of fake profiles. Armed with the data from the dump, Gizmodo parsed through user data to find out whether allegations of bots were true. And based on the evidence, the answer is: Yep. In fact, it might actually be worse than what Impact Team characterized previously. According to the user demographics provided by Ashley Madison, the imbalance is already apparent: out of the 37 million registered users, only 5.5 million had profiles with female-identified users. But further digging into the issue found a grim reality: out of those 5.5 million female-identified accounts, zero percent had shown any activity at all the day after they were created.