Last year, as if the Josh Duggar situation couldn’t get debauched enough, it emerged that he was a regular customer at cheating megasite Ashley Madison. He was one of several cheaters who were exposed when Ashley Madison was hacked last summer. Well, it turns out that while he was trolling for an affair, he may not have been talking to an actual woman. The site’s parent admitted that many of the “women” on its site were actually computer programs.
On Monday, Avid Life Media, parent of Ashley Madison, made its first public statement in over a year. It announced that three months earlier, Rob Segal had taken over as CEO, and James Millership was its new president. They want to reposition Ashley Madison as “the world’s most open-minded dating community,” appealing to both cheaters and non-cheaters alike.
In an interview with Reuters, Segal and Millership dropped a bombshell–a review by Ernst & Young found that many of the female “cheaters” on Ashley Madison were actually computer programs designed to act like women. By at least one estimate, only 15 percent of the 5.5 million female profiles actually belonged to someone with a pulse.
These programs, or “fembots,” were initially operated worldwide, and struck up conversations with paying male customers. According to the report, the American, Canadian, and Australian fembots were shut down in 2014. However, a number of American cheaters were chatting with foreign-based fembots until the fembots were taken offline worldwide in 2015.
Gizmodo’s Annalee Newitz first stumbled on this last year, when she discovered that Ashley Madison used 70,572 bots–known as “engagers” or “hosts” within Avid Life circles–to chat with users. Out of that total, a grand total of 43 were male; the rest were female. The bots were programmed with automated messages when a man responded to their chat requests, and asked them to pay credits to talk further.
There was also a premium bot service for cheaters who wanted a “guaranteed affair.” Bots connected to this service would chat with men for awhile, wring them for credits, then hand them off to a third party who connected them to someone with a pulse.
Segal and Millership told The New York Times that they demanded assurances that all bots were disabled before taking over the company. They also revealed that Avid Life Media is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. While Avid claims it doesn’t know the focus of the investigation, both Vanity Fair and British cybersecurity expert Graham Cluley reported that the FTC is looking into the fembots. The FTC came down hard on UK-based JDI Dating two years ago for using bots, and the lawyer who represented JDI thinks the FTC is all but certain to delve into Ashley Madison’s bots.
If it turns out that Josh was approached by a bot, it would serve him right. Remember, folks, he cheated on his wife, Anna, while swiping pictures from at least two innocent third parties. Moreover, he kept looking for hookups after he was engaged to Anna, and continued for some time after he and Anna married in 2008. Now it turns out that Josh may not have been talking to a real woman on Ashley Madison, but to a computer. Karma has a funny way of rearing its head, doesn’t it?
