The cheating website that targeted your husband

If we thought it was just for younger men, we were wrong. A new investigation has shown just how many older men were being lured into cheating on their wives…

The ‘Have an affair’ website Ashley Madison has been revealed to have targeted older men with fake profiles, according to an investigation by the Daily Mail.

They allege that the adultery website wanted older, more vulnerable men to sign up to increase their revenue. The catch? There were hardly any real women on the site, so it was almost nothing short of a money grab.

The research from DM showed the cheating website created 40,000 or fake members and doubled monthly revenue in the process by sending ads and messages to older men.

Top executives were believed to be involved in the elaborate scandal and knowingly created the fake profiles to lure in men.

Data scientist Jeremy Bullock 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.

“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”, Bullock said.

Husbands around the world were allegedly sent ‘are you online’ messages to create the illusion a woman was on the other end. But when they clicked through and signed up, there was no pay off.

If all statistics are correct, only a very small number of women signed up to the site.

But in response, Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, said that the fake profiles had been set up by scammers and had nothing to do with administrators. This was found to not be 100 per cent true as many of the fake profiles had an ashleymadison.com email address and matched the IP address of the company.

So let’s think about this: if your long term partner was found to be looking for an affair or coaxed into one, but didn’t actually do anything, is that still a betrayal?

Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz took a closer look at the data and found that barely any of the 5.5 million profiles marked as “female” actually used the website.

Just 1,492 real women ever checked their matches on the site, compared with 31 million men. That’s quite confronting data when you think about it. You’d have better chances winning the lotto than having an affair.

So we want to know today, if your partner went on Ashley Madison, but realistically never did anything, is it still a betrayal? Is it cheating? Or is it excusable?