Ashley Madison admits using fembots to lure men into spending money http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/ashley-madison-admits-using-fembots-to-lure-men-into-spending-money/ The scam was simple: when a man signed up for a free account, he almost immediately got a chat or private message from a "woman" whose profile showed a few sexy pictures. To reply to his new lady friend, the man had to pay for an account. In reality, that lady was a few lines of PHP code. In internal e-mails, company executives shared documents that showed more than three-quarters of all paying customers had been converted by a fembot, referred to as a "host." There were more than 70 thousand of these fembot accounts, created in dozens of languages by data entry workers. The workers were told to populate these accounts with fake information and real photos posted by women who had shut down their accounts on Ashley Madison or other properties owned by Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media. - - -
--Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone. _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
