What's It All About, Ashley Madison? A Court Case Intends to Find Out

Some 50 years ago, we had “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

Now, legal action brought by an Ashley Madison subscriber threatens to untangle the world of web bots and fake online profiles/IDs in a saga whose tag line could be, “What’s it all about, Ashley?”

Indeed, a lawsuit brought by David Poyet against Avid Life Media and Avid Life Dating dba Ashley Madison in Federal Court on Oct. 29 seeks to unshroud the cloud surrounding Ashley Madison once and for all.

“Ashley Madison went to extreme measures to fraudulently lure in and profit from customers,” according to the complaint. “Defendants’ fraudulent and deceitful actions include, but are not limited to: marketing that the site had 5.5 million female profiles, when only a small percentage of the profiles belonged to actual women who used the site; hiring employees whose jobs were to create thousands of fake female profiles; and creating over 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages,” according to a report on Courthouse News Service.

The Ashley Madison website, for those of us who haven’t followed the news close enough to know the ins and outs, was basically a place online where married individuals interested in cheating on their spouses could create an anonymous profile and mingle online with other like-minded individuals looking to have an “affair”.

With the registered trademark, “Life is short. Have an affair.” and its self-proclamation of being “the world’s leading married dating service for discreet encounters,” the Ashley Madison premise seems pretty straightforward.

So, who duped who? And were its subscribers scammed or simply caught with their pants down?

Poyet’s lawsuit aims to successfully dismantle the technological mystery behind the site’s 42 million+ profiles and perhaps punish or at least dissuade others from using the same tact.

Ashley Madison first gained international attention in July when hackers, dubbed the Impact Team, took the personal information (passwords, financial information and people’s sexual fantasies) of the site’s roughly 37 million subscribers.

After Avid Life refused their demands to shut the site down, the hackers released much of the information in a public data dump on Aug. 18. According to Courthouse News, the “names of thousands of U.S. government employees were among the subscribers, as were addresses connected to the United Nations and the Vatican.”

In his complaint, Poyet claims the data breach revealed that “contrary to the site’s advertisements, only 15 percent of its users were women,” meaning men on the site were frequently unknowingly paying with ”credits” to talk to fembots instead of real women.

He also claims that “comments in the code include ‘host bot mother creates engagers; [and] birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!’” demonstrate the fraud that was being perpetrated.

Says Poyet’s complaint, “In short, defendants did not only mislead in marketing and promoting the website, they purposefully induced members - like plaintiff and the class - to engage with the fake profiles by sending out the initial communication to members. This directly caused members to incur costs while believing it was an actual person communicating with them.”

In his lawsuit, Poyet seeks an “injunction banning Avid Life from using ‘undisclosed fake profiles’ on its website, restitution, and punitive damages for fraud, unfair competition, false advertising, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment.”

Both Poyet’s counsel and Avid Life class declined to comment to Courthouse News. Poyet is represented by Brian Robbins with Robbins Arroyo of San Diego.

To read more about the world of Ashley Madison and what reporter Annalee Newitz describes as “like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.”, see this article on Gizmodo.com.