COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- A chief executive for a dating website marketed toward married people has a theory on why Columbus suddenly jumped to the top of sign-ups.
Toronto-based Ruby Corp., the owner of Ashley Madison, named the capital of Ohio as the No. 1 U.S. city creating new accounts on the cheating website. Known for a less-than-traditional slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," Ashley Madison also included Cleveland and Cincinnati in its top 20 sign-up list.
The list cites data gathered from June 20 to Sept. 22 of last year and ranked cities on the number of sign-ups against the area's total population, rather than raw accounts. But a spokesperson for Ruby Corp. declined to provide the number of sign-ups tied to Columbus, or the percentage of the area's population that created accounts, calling both "competitive intelligence." Still, Ashley Madison's website touts "more than 80 million sign-ups since 2002."
In an interview with NBC4, Ruby Corp.'s Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable theorized that Intel, data center and information technology developments could be components in how Columbus suddenly sprung to the top.
"We haven't seen Columbus in this position ever before," Keable said. "You cite some of the increase of population and economic growth in relation to the IT industry. And that actually is one of our top professions, when we polled our members, 'Which types of jobs do you have?' It was certainly within the top five, I think. And if that is clearly a part and parcel of what's happened in Columbus, I would not be surprised to see you continue to be in the top 10, if not top five, as a go-forward basis for our reporting."
A Bank of America Insitute Ranking reported that Columbus grew faster than any other city in the U.S. during the second half of 2023, the same time period that Ashley Madison gathered its data for the top 20 list. Moreover, an earlier study indicated Columbus is the only place in Ohio where the population grew over two decades. It's only going up from here, as the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission -- crediting multibillion-dollar investments from Intel and Honda -- forecasted that central Ohio could be home to 3.15 million people by 2050.
Keable added that with Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati all on the list, people here may be telling of cultural attitudes around marital affairs.
"What I find fascinating this time round is with three cities from Ohio … Ohio is a swing state politically, is probably more representative of the true America than you know, New York might be or LA might be, because those have very unique cultures that are very specific to those places," Keable said. "Whereas Ohio stands out of place as typically Middle America. It's your average American. And what it tells us is that infidelity, non-monogamy is rather ubiquitous against your race, your income level, your education, and where you live."
The CSO said that as of 2024, Ashley Madison has about 365,000 new members each month, and the website's gender ratio is one man for every 0.7 women. But records leaked a decade ago in a highly publicized data breach previously raised questions about how many of those accounts belonged to real people.
A Gizmodo investigation of the leaked data -- which included internal emails from when Ruby Corp. was branded as Avid Life Media Inc. -- found Ashley Madison was paying people to create fake female profiles and talk with men on the site. Going deeper into hacked source code, the company itself also created more than 70,000 female bots that sent more than 20 million messages to court real male subscribers. Ashley Madison lets women message for free but requires men to pay for the same feature.
"But once she engages with you, if she responds, your conversation can be free for the rest of the time," Keable noted.
The hack did not capture any recorded activity between humans, however, meaning there's no telling how many real women were on the site. Keable wasn't shy about talking about the bots, which Ashley Madison previously codenamed "engagers" and "angels."
"We actually brought in Ernst and Young Global auditing firm to go through our source code, review all the details to verify in fact that that program, and all presence of those bots, as it were, are no longer there," Keable said. "We understand that the previous organization and management made some bad choices, and that was part of our growth phase. We can't hide from that, but that's no longer part of our system."
While Ashley Madison has scrubbed the internal bots from their site, Keable admitted they, like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and other traditional dating sites, now have had problems with external bots deployed for sextortion schemes. In these scenarios, a scammer uses a fake profile to seduce a real person and then records sexually explicit photos or videos of them to use as blackmail. Revisiting the affair website, Gizmodo found more than 200 consumer complaints filed in the past five years by clients who fell victim.
While Keable credited a "business intelligence" system as a first layer of defense for Ashley Madison, he shared red flags that could give away a scam attempt on any website.
"If you're signing up and your IP address says you're in the Philippines, but you're saying you're
located in Columbus, guess what, that doesn't count, you're out of the system, we immediately
would pick that up, and you'd be out within three seconds," Keable said. "If you meet someone online, whether it's on our dating site or any other one, and they want to immediately jump off the site to a private conversation, that's a bit of a red flag … if they give you a link that you don't recognize, that certainly would be a massive red flag, don't click on that. I think the majority of them are often trying to take you to a cam site, so they can make money off you there."
In Ohio, Reps. Brian Lorenz (R-Powell) and Beth Lear (R-Galena) recently introduced a bill to make sexual extortion a crime. And the FBI has recently investigated sextortion cases in the state, but those involved minors.
