Ashley Madison Was the Greatest Scam Ever

The Weekly Standard reports:

The site claimed 37 million users, which, if true, would be an enormous percentage of America's married population. (That would be roughly half of all married people between the ages of 25 and 55. (Which sounded incredibly implausible.)

And now we know that Ashley Madison's claims were implausible. An investigation of the site's user database found that there were 31 million profiles for men. However, only 20 million male "users" ever bothered to check their Ashley Madison message box even once, and only 11 million male users ever engaged the website's chat function, even once. A lot of people clearly just signed up out of curiosity.

The database also shows that there were 5.5 million women on Ashley Madison-but when reporter Annalee Newitz drilled down into their user profiles, an astonishing number of these women appear to be fakes-that is, dummy accounts created by the Ashley Madison staff to make it look like there was a pool of women looking for action. And by "astonishing," I mean that it looks like the number of real, live women using the site was somewhere between 1,500 and 10,000.

How about them numbers!