Ride the Lightning

FTC Probes Ashley Madison

July 7, 2016

You mean you didn't sign up with Ashley Madison to communicate with fembots and pay good money for the privilege of doing so?

As Ashley Madison seeks to recover from last year's breach of its cheaters' date site (tagline: "Life is short. Have an affair"), the new management folks at parent company Avid Life Media told Reuters that the site is now the target of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation.

AS Reuters reported, the breach cost Avid Life Media more than a quarter of its revenue, according to Chief Executive Rob Segal and President James Millership.

"We are profoundly sorry," said Segal, adding that more could perhaps have been spent on security. Do ya think?

The two executives, hired in April, said the closely held company is spending millions to improve security and looking at payment options that offer more privacy. The company has serious problems, including U.S. and Canadian class action lawsuits filed on behalf of customers whose personal information was posted online, and allegations that it used fake profiles to manipulate some customers. The site's male-to-female user ratio is five to one.

An Ernst & Young report commissioned by Avid and shared with Reuters confirmed that Avid used computer programs, dubbed fembots, that impersonated real women, striking up conversations with paying male customers. The report states that Avid shut down the fake profiles in the United States, Canada and Australia in 2014 and by late 2015 in the rest of the world, but some U.S. users had message exchanges with foreign fembots until late in 2015.

Another site, JDI Dating, paid $616,165 in redress for similar practices in an October 2014 settlement with the FTC.

Avid said it does not know the focus of its FTC investigation. Asked about the fembot messages sent to U.S. customers, Segal said: "That's a part of the ongoing process that we're going through … it's with the FTC right now."

The FTC's consumer protection unit investigates cases of deceptive advertising, including instances when consumers are told that their information is secure but then it is handled sloppily.

The executives said the Ashley Madison name would endure, though they are moving some focus away from infidelity. "We certainly feel that the Ashley Madison brand can be repositioned," Segal said.

I doubt that but "repositioned" is certainly an interesting choice of words. I can't imagine Ashley Madison ever getting away from the image of a cheating site that suffered a breach and used fembots to pry open the wallets of its male customers.

E-mail: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
http://www.senseient.com
http://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
www.linkedin.com/in/sharondnelson