Opening up his Yahoo e-mail, John R. couldn’t help but be startled by the subject line of a message declaring: “You got busted.” 
 
 The 35-year-old, who works in the science field and asked that only his first name be published for personal and professional reasons, immediately clicked on the bait. 
 
 “Unfortunately your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I know [sic] have your information,” said the message. 
 
 “I have also used your user profile to find your Facebook page, using this I can now message all of your friends and family members,” it continued. 
 
 The poorly spelled extortion letter then demanded 2 bitcoin (worth approximately $500 when John received the e-mail in September) to be paid within three days. Otherwise, according to the sender, John’s friends and family would be automatically informed of his Ashley Madison membership. 
 
 Such e-mails have shown up in the inboxes of the estimated 37 million Ashley Madison users whose information was breached after a high-profile hack of the site in August. Ashley Madison is infamous for providing unfaithful spouses a platform to find illicit trysts. 
 
 Software-security expert Johannes Ullrich, Ph.D., dean of research for SANS Technology Institute in Jacksonville, Fla., believes the extortionists are unlikely to be part of the hacking group Impact Team, which shook down Ashley Madison. 
 
 “They used spambot techniques, which are favorites of the Russian mob and Nigerian scammers,” Ullrich says, adding it’s unlikely they would follow through with their threats. 
 
 “It would be too much trouble for them, and there is a risk they could be traced,” he says. 
 
 As for John, he was so concerned that he might be outed as a member of Ashley Madison and that his wife would “freak” that he consulted the New York-based reputation-management firm Status Labs, which has set up a free hotline advising extortion victims of the perpetrators’ tactics. 
 
 John, who had signed up for the infidelity Web site in the fall of 2013 for $350 when he and his wife of six years “could barely stand in the same room without arguing,” maintains his trysts never went offline. 
 
 “I didn’t meet with any of them in person but I was tempted,” says the God-fearing Missouri native, who nevertheless had an online “emotional affair” with one woman, with whom he exchanged sexy photos. He deleted his account in September 2014 after deciding to fix his marriage. 
 
 When that mending process was threatened by the blackmailers a year later, he was reassured by Status Labs, which advised him to not make any bitcoin transactions and to take the precaution of making his list of Facebook friends private. 
 
 Says Status Labs president Darius Fisher: “It’s simple to switch your privacy settings, but it’s important to remember that these extortionists, like all scammers and spammers, are playing a numbers game. 
 
 “If they scare even one or two people into paying up, it’s a big payday for them.” ||||| Fembots Populated Ashley Madison, Class Says LOS ANGELES (CN) - Online cheating site Ashley Madison not only embarrassed people in a massive data leak, it cheated men by concealing that only 15 percent of its users were real women, a subscriber claims in a federal class action. 
 
 David Poyet sued Avid Life Media and Avid Life Dating dba Ashley Madison in Federal Court on Oct. 29. 
 
 More than 70,000 so-called women on the site were actually "fembots," Poyet says: bogus profiles of imaginary women supposedly interested in real men. 
 
 Ashley Madison made world headlines in July after hackers calling themselves the Impact Team swiped the personal information of the site's roughly 37 million subscribers, including passwords, financial information and people's sexual fantasies . 
 
 The hackers released enormous amounts of the information in a public data dump on Aug. 18 after Avid Life refused their demands to shut the site down. Names of thousands of U.S. government employees were among the subscribers, as were addresses connected to the United Nations and the Vatican. 
 
 Poyet claims the data breach also revealed that, contrary to the site's advertisements, only 15 percent of its users were women. 
 
 "Ashley Madison went to extreme measures to fraudulently lure in and profit from customers. Defendants' fraudulent and deceitful actions include, but are not limited to: marketing that the site had 5.5 million female profiles, when only a small percentage of the profiles belonged to actual women who used the site; hiring employees whose jobs were to create thousands of fake female profiles; and creating over 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages," the complaint states. 
 
 Since users are charged "credits" each time they communicate with someone else, Poyet says, he and other male users were paying to talk to robots more often than to real women. 
 
 Ashley Madison's computer code, which was revealed in the data dump, showed that the site had created "fembots" programmed to interact with male subscribers. Comments in the code include "host bot mother creates engagers; [and] birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!" according to the complaint. 
 
 Poyet claims this "army of fembots" contacted male users more than 20 million times, reaping massive profits for Avid Life at the expense of the men who believed they were talking with human beings. 
 
 Had he known that most of the female profiles contacting him were fake, Poyet says, he never would have joined. 
 
 "In short, defendants did not only mislead in marketing and promoting the website, they purposefully induced members - like plaintiff and the class - to engage with the fake profiles by sending out the initial communication to members. This directly caused members to incur costs while believing it was an actual person communicating with them," the complaint states. 
 
 Avid Life did not return request for comment. 
 
 Poyet seeks class certification, an injunction banning Avid Life from using "undisclosed fake profiles" on its website, restitution, and punitive damages for fraud, unfair competition, false advertising, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment. 
 
 He is represented by Brian Robbins with Robbins Arroyo of San Diego, who declined to comment.
– Ashley Madison attracted male customers with the claim that 30%—or 5.5 million—of its profiles belonged to women. In reality, as few as 12,000 real women may have been active on the site, according to a class-action lawsuit that's just hit Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media. David Poyet is suing for $5 million in damages, claiming the site "went to extreme measures to fraudulently lure in and profit from customers," including "creating over 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages," report TMZ and Courthouse News. Since users are charged "credits" for each communication with another user, Poyet alleges he and others were paying Ashley Madison simply to talk to its "army of fembots." The complaint notes computer code, part of a mass leak in August, reads "host bot mother creates engagers; [and] birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!" In other words, the site "purposefully induced members ... to engage with the fake profiles by sending out the initial communication to members. This directly caused members to incur costs while believing it was an actual person communicating with them," the complaint states. Avid Life has yet to respond. Ashley Madison users who had their names made public in the leak are still feeling the burn, the New York Post reports: Extortionists have been threatening to post a user's membership to his or her Facebook page unless they're sent $500. (Ashley Madison also used fake female CEOs.)