We’ve written a lot about Ashley Madison, the online infidelity dating website, has certainly seen its share of trouble over the past several years. In addition to having an extremely controversial business to begin with (matching up married people who want to have affairs), they also had one of the most highly publicized data security hacks in history. You undoubtedly heard about all the people whose personal information (including sexual fetishes) was published publicly after the hack last year.
The FTC is now probing the company again, and rumors are its because of fembots and their fraudulent use to make users think there were actual women using the site.
Many people believe that the FTC is looking into the use of fraudulent ‘fembots’ on the site. Fembots are automated programs that were used on the site to make it look like there were more females than there actually were. These bots had profiles that were indistinguishable from real profiles (almost certainly with attractive profile pictures). The bots would contact male users of the sites and even have ‘conversations’ with them to make them feel like they had a chance at having an actual affair.
Another dating site had reached a settlement with the FTC late in 2014 for using fembots.
They had to pay out $616,165 for that activity. Ashley Madison has stopped the use of fembots, but they didn’t do it very quickly. Their use was phased out in 2014 for the US, Canada and Australia. They continued to be used through late 2015 though for the rest of the world. This resulted in some Americans continuing to have message exchanges with foreign fembots until late last year.
While both Ashley Madison executives and the FTC have said they can’t comment on their ongoing investigation, it seems likely that this is what it is about.
Like them or hate them, Ashley Madison has had extremely successful marketing and was already beginning to recover from the huge hit they took related to the hack last year. This latest probe from the FTC will undoubtedly be another big hurdle they need to overcome.
