I look at the whole debacle with Ashley Madison and it raises a lot of issues, from financial to privacy it’s a mighty big can of worms. Ashley Madison was huge, they owned a lot of sites, including Arrangementfinders.com, Kayden Kross is said to have invested a lot of money in that company, one million dollars if you believe it. That investment is now toast, the lawsuits filed against Ashley Madison are going to bankrupt them without a doubt. the blow back from this is huge for more people than just Kayden.
Now Ashley Madison, I don’t think was lax with their security they use the same protocols we all do in this online world, including your bank. If it was done to them it could be done to anyone, and if you look back, it has been…Home Depot, Target, Epsilon, Sony, Global payment Systems, Zappos, Adobe, Neiman Marcus, Yahoo, Michaels, Marriot, Hilton, Sheraton, Westin. Banks are where the money is but most people keep an eye on their accounts so a security breech that steals your money is detected pretty quick and in most cases, insured. My accounts have been hacked every time I caught it pretty quick because my bank sent an alert or because I was just checking my account. Being a vendor I made the effort to notify the vendors where the fraudulent purchases were made (all online) and told them and they stopped the shipment and thanked me profusely because in all likelihood THEY would have been the ones who lost…I got my money back the vendors wouldn’t have.
So do you have a website? a clips4sale store? Do you have online banking? You are just as vulnerable as Ashley Madison and Target.
The thing with Ashley Madison is interesting though because there’s no real big effort to find out who it was. Believe me if Bank of America gets hacked the FBI is all over it and they will at least find someone to hang it on, but Ashley Madison is kinda on their own.
Is this how our enemies destroy us? It’s kind of the online version of going through the parking lot and taking down license plate numbers parked at the local adult bookstore and posting them in the church bulletin.
There’s oh so much that makes the Ashley Madison thing interesting, like its a multi million dollar enterprise..or was that is based on the purest of optimism. 95% of the members of Ashley Madison were men, the chances of getting a real hook up were almost nil. but because men will brag about their sexual prowess and say they got laid when they didn’t Ashley Madison sucked lots of them in…and there’s always the possibility that Ashley Madison had employees pretending to be female and sending private messages and such to keep them being members, and even though arrangement finders is arguably a direct front for prostitution I’d bet that plenty of “escorts” used Ashley Madison to ply their trade…leaving what percentage of real girls looking for affairs…I’m guessing 1% at best. Talk about a a fortune made by exploiting hope….
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Make A Fortune Exploiting Hope but remember Easy Come Easy Go http://t.co/XiVa5Gj9hi
Your last point is good one. The biggest irony of all of this is men are going to lose their marriages over a website they never got sex from!
Many years go they did market it heavily to single men too (the lonely housewife angle). I was single at the time and joined it. After about one week I realized very clearly that every single ad I emailed (or emailed me) were fakes. I was never ever going to get a woman there unless that one in a million chance you hit that one girl out of the 1000 guys ratio. I went on to other things, and left the unused credits (you had to buy a pack of credits to email people) on the site.
I am getting married, and yes, the email address I used back then is in the database. Nobody knows that email address but if they go to real names, I will be there. Believe me, I do wonder if my soon to be wife will accept the truth that i used it in 2008 when I was single (I met my fiance in 2013); or if she will now “be suspicious” of me.
There are lots of interesting twists and turns here.
I think the #1 thing to learn is to never ever give your personal data to anything that might become leverage against you in the future. If you want to buy porn memberships, make sure your wife is cool with it. Mine is, although she doesn’t like the hard gonzo stuff so I do watch porn alone sometimes. She knows though. If not, use visa gift cards and fake addresses. Things like that.
I don’t advocate cheating on spouse. I believe very strongly that marriage is a sexual commitment and any porn or sexual adventures should be shared together as a couple (swinging and so forth is perfectly wonderful if you share it together so I am not saying you have to be monagamous). If you have to start lying to your spouse you should consider just getting a divorce and being free. That is better in the long run than sneaking around and lying to people who trust you. If you are worried about hurting your kids, they will grow up feeling fine if you and your wife have to divorce,.. it will cause much more damage if they find out you were cheating on her. So, if you want to fuck girls and not be committed, don’t lie… become single. It is sound advice.
Its pretty common knowledge that the vast majority of porn stars also escort. Its not easy to make money in porn any more unless the girls do porn to get famous and then escort to get those $1000-3000 an hour fees.
Sooner or later someone in the govt. is gonna wise up to this system and come down hard on the industry.
“So do you have a website? a clips4sale store? Do you have online banking? You are just as vulnerable as Ashley Madison and Target.”
It really depends how you handle things here. Not everyone should be storing credit card information, especially not in a format that is locally readable. It would appear that part of AM (and other large companies) problems revolve around being their own credit card processor, and perhaps not doing as good a job at securing that information. The CC information really should be secured independent of other information, perhaps on different servers and only accessible “one way”, so that the main system cannot re-read it, only invoke it for processing. There should be no simple way to pull a list of users and credit card numbers.
It is telling to me that this hack is way more about the membership list and not about making a profit on the CCs. That scammers have pretty much been licing up to use the membership list data to extort people and cause problems.
You are correct though: This case exposes dating apps for what they really are, the ultimate male fantasy with almost no girls playing the game. The good news is that it’s like explaining the odds of winning a lottery, most people will still line up and buy a ticket every week, hoping….
I can remember years ago finding out in an adultfriendfinder ad that 2 girls that looked exactly like Gianna Michaels and Cassandra Calogera just happened to live in my small New England town and were looking for romance (note sarcasm). Using famous porn stars pictures to get people to join that service showed what kind of scammers they were.
Exploiting hopes?
If men are losing their marriage over a past or present Ashley Madison account…well you know what they say about the straw that broke the camels back.
“If you have to start lying …..lying to people who trust you”
that’s key, any marriage worth saving is gonna go through rough patches might get ugly too…93 hubby left a window open on a shared PC to a trial dating thing…I was pissed..I got even 😉 another trial same info 2 changes, female & username.
My mistake was telling my best friend ….the next three weeks were hell with her & every woman in our social circle in my ear all day what they’d do…and me refusing to mention it until hubby brought it up.
Sucked to be him when he did bring it up…he accused me of snooping …he knew I hadn’t but he was pissed to realize the Inquiries weren’t for him….I asked how many nights he was babysitting…yeah this made the rounds here there everywhere bets taken we were over & 10th anniversary was a ruse….
We’re still here and he says…”awww nobody wants me anyway” just to hear “sure they do, old & grey don’t matter if ya have a nice car” 🙂
We’re also still friends with most of these couples, if any wives told their hubby…he knew better than ever say so to me or hubby until he brought it up, and that is why we’re still friends decades later.
There’s a saying that there are two kinds of companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know that they have been hacked. Read the inside story of how Sony got hacked in Fortune magazine.
When I read about the millions of emails in their database and Mike’s post here about Kayden allegedly investing a million bucks in a subsidiary website, I have two thoughts.
I’m willing to bet a million bucks that a significant majority of those emails are from curiosity seekers. I’ve never signed up there, but heck, I got curious about Ashley Madison when someone first told me about it, went to the site, and realized that I had to pay to look around. I wasn’t willing to do that. So, I’m not in there. But, I could just as easily have been in there. I did once go to The Erotic Review and signed up so I could read reviews of porn stars who escort, and I’ve never once tried to hire an escort of any kind, let alone a porn star. So, you’ve got a fair number of people who are probably going to have some ‘splaining to do because they were curious.
The other is that folks were always lauding Kayden Kross for her financial expertise, because she said she read The Economist and wrote columns telling porn stars what to do with their money. Her advice was mostly terrible – it was sort of like Asia Carerra telling everyone she was both a Mensa member and killing it in the stock market buying tech stocks – until the market crashed and she lost it all.
Anyway, if Kayden really was successful enough to put away a million after tax and above her household needs and then invested it in this business ….. she demonstrated why you don’t take financial advice from a porn star.
“So, you’ve got a fair number of people who are probably going to have some ‘splaining to do because they were curious”
Exactly, there are lists w 15k government workers …why? If you’re stupid enough to use your .gov or .work email addy on a dating site…you deserve to be splaining.
Five year olds know parents & teachers get reports on their leap tablet activity…that’s their work. Grandson isn’t five yet and he told me…GG I want my own log in on the iPad? His own access code to plug in his own user name /password on the Lego app…and yes he picked a different username/pw. Two years ago he’d look at flash cards & tap the ad..” Aww Dean ya went everywhere, everywhere” we’d help him back where he wanted to be…now he tells us where he wants to go and he doesn’t want us looking.
Preschoolers are bitching cuz their parents block in-app purchases before they can wipe their asses….we really do know what we need before Kindergarten.