Trust us: Lots and lots of people still want to cheat on Ashley Madison.
The embattled adultery site said Monday it’s been signing up hundreds of thousands of new customers — including women — despite that hackers published the personal data of millions of its clients.
“Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated,” the Toronto company said in a statement, adding that its “day-to-day operations” are continuing amid investigations into the hacking.
Ashley Madison struck its fresh, defiant tone just days after it tossed Chief Exec Noel Biderman, who recently was hit with a host of over-the-top accusations that he gave company techies the OK to commit corporate spying. (But the techies allegedly refused to do the spying.)
Also last week, a slew of salacious e-mails got leaked, suggesting Biderman had been cheating on his own wife for years, despite touting himself as a devoted husband and father of two.
“Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing,” Ashley Madison said in the Monday statement. “This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform — including 87,596 women.”
Indeed, a bevy of women hungry for extramarital hookups sent more than 2.8 million messages on Ashley Madison’s platform last week, the company claimed.
The company did not go beyond the statement to give perspective to the stats.
Ashley Madison’s owner, Avid Life Media, hit back at a report last week that claimed the site had as few as 12,000 active female users, saying that data released by hackers had been incorrectly analyzed.
Gawker Media-owned tech blog Gizmodo, which had reported the estimate of 12,000 active female users, citing its own analysis, admitted on Monday afternoon it had drawn incorrect conclusions from hacked data.
Gizmodo granted it had significantly underestimated the ranks of female users. Still, the blog added that there is “new evidence” that Ashley Madison systematically created more than 70,000 female “bots” to send fake come-ons to unsuspecting males.
“Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud,” Gizmodo reporter Annalee Newitz wrote.
“Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site,” she added.
In some instances, the female bots appeared to engage male clients with canned responses, urging them to pay for credits allowing them to talk further before passing them on to an “affiliate,” according to Gizmodo.
“Likely the affiliate is a third party that provides a real person for the man to chat with,” Newitz said. “It might also be connecting him to an escort service.”
Ashley Madison didn’t immediately comment on the latest allegations about female bots.
In its Monday statement, the company said the ratio of paying male clients to non-paying females was 1.2 to 1.