Scammers and Spammers: Inside Online Dating’s Sex Bot Con Job
The company incentivizes members to prove they’re who they say they are by sending in copies of their drivers licenses in return for a “verified” button on their profiles (similar to the little blue checks on Twitter accounts). The fact that men outnumber women on the site’s heterosexual platform ten-to-one is just life, they figure, and the women on the site are seemingly active enough to keep the guys onboard. For AFF, bots are a cop out, though the appeal of building them is obvious enough to Conru. “If I wanted to boost our revenue and move to the Cayman Islands, we could probably double our revenue simply by using bots,” he says. “And our bots would kick ass.”
The fact that AI con artists are up to such tricks isn’t surprising or new. But what’s truly phenomenal is the durability of this online hustle, and the millions of saps still falling for it. “A lot of people think this only happens to dumb people, and they can tell if they’re talking to a bot,” says Steve Baker, a lead investigator for the Federal Trade Commission tells me. “But you can’t tell. The people running these scams are professionals, they do this for a living.”
The scam starts with creating a chat bot, which is easier than you’d think. Bot software is freely available online. The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, or ALICE, which generates scripts for chatterbots, has been around for decades. These programs can be modified for any purpose, though designing a believable online dating companion can take considerable time and effort — perhaps too much for some of the troops at Ashley Madison.
In 2012, Doriana Silva, a former Ashley Madison employee in Toronto, sued Avid Life Media for $20 million complaining that she suffered from repetitive strain injury while creating over 1,000 sexbots — known within the company as “Ashley’s Angels” — for the site. The company countersued Silva, alleging that she absconded with confidential “work product and training materials,” and posted pictures of her on a jet ski to suggest she wasn’t so injured after all. (Both sides agreed to drop the suits early last year.)
Despite the controversy, the company subsequently attempted to streamline its bot-creation process. Internal documents leaked during the Ashley Madison hack detail how, according to a 2013 email from managing director Keith Lalonde to then-CEO Noel Biderman, the company improved sex machine production for “building Angels enmass [sic].” This was done, Lalonde wrote, because the staff was getting “writers block when making them one at a time and were not being creative enough.” (Reps for Ashley Madison did not return requests for comment).