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

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.