ASHLEY MADISON
A photo illustration shows the Ashley Madison website displayed on a smartphone in Toronto, August 20, 2015. Love lives and reputations may be at risk after the release of customer data from infidelity website Ashley Madison, an unprecedented breach of privacy likely to rattle users' attitudes towards the Internet. Hackers dumped a big cache of data containing millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations late on Tuesday, the latest cyber attack to raise concerns about Internet security and data protection. Reuters/Mark Blinch

The Ashley Madison saga continues and new data suggest that the male members were not actually having affairs, but paying for fantasies. That is, it appears that very few to zero of the female user accounts were real.

This allegation came out after a Gizmodo writer analysed both the public and sensitive information from the recent Impact Team online dump and found that the men who had been paying for their subscriptions could have been talking to women who did not exist. According to Annalee Newitz, the writer of the exposé, on quick observation, the site's 31 million listed male members were competing for the attention of just 5.5 million women. Upon closer examination of the latter, Newitz said it appears that only about 12,000 of the 5.5 million belonged to real, breathing females.

The disclosure relates very closely to a case filed against the Canadian adultery site in 2012, where a former staff member sought damages for her "terrible work conditions." Doriana Silva claimed that the firm asked her to create 1,000 fake female profiles in three months, resulting in various stress injuries. She also said that the profiles she made were written in Portuguese because Avid Life Media, which runs Ashley Madison, wanted to get more attention from the Brazilian audience. Her case was eventually settled out of court and the company has denied that it is setting up fake profiles, writes The Independent .

In the same Gizmodo feature, Newitz said that she looked into the email addresses used to create the female profiles and found that they were similar to each other and bore the ashleymadison.com email address. More than 9,000 of the addresses were assigned to female profiles, while around 1,000 were given to men. Some of the profiles did not specify a gender. The birthdays also appeared to be fake, although Newitz acknowledged that this is common practice, because most of them fell under January, or the first month that appears on the drop-down menu selection. The report also noted that out of the 5.5 million accounts allegedly owned by females, zero percent showed any activity after they were created.

Impact Team dumped user accounts and sensitive emails related to Ashley Madison on Aug. 18 after Avid Life Media refused to shut the site down despite threats from the hackers. The Canadian authorities have already announced a bounty of CAD$500,000 (AU$523,000) for the person who can point the identities of those behind Team Impact as well as their whereabouts.

Contact the writer at feedback@ibtimes.com.au or let us know what you think below.

RELATED STORIES