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On Ashley Madison, Men Were Reportedly Seeking An Affair With Nobody

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Whatever the thousands of Chicago users of the infidelity website Ashley Madison were seeking, it didn't turn out to be sex.

A fascinating analysis of the leaked user accounts found that the site was filled with millions of men--and, almost no real women.

According to the report by Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz, about 4,000 women (out of a purported 5.5 million plus accounts) either checked their messages or used the service's chat feature (or both). That means that only .0007 percent of the women "signed up" actually ever bothered to engage with any of the tens of millions of men who did the same thing.

That number is probably smaller, as one might expect that some of the women simply checked a message and never responded, meaning that there was no engagement at all.

Further, Newitz found, that nearly all of the five million female accounts were fake.

On Friday, the CEO of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, left the company. According to a company statement, the decision was "mutual" and in "the best interests of the company."

Beyond that, no real reason was given for the split. However, the narrative behind the hack and subsequent release of Ashley Madison's data is turning from moralizing anger to whether the entire operation was a colossal money-making scam.

A few years ago, Ashley Madison's hype-meisters claimed that Chicago was a "cheater's paradise." And another analysis of the data shows that accounts originating here ranked in the Top 10 worldwide.

And news of the leak led to multitudes of reports of corporate and government emails tied to Ashley Madison accounts, followed by advice from experts on how to deal with with a spouse who was cheating.

However, it is clear that whatever men were looking for (or if they were even aware their emails were being used) on Ashley Madison, it wasn't for an actual physical, sexual relationship with anybody.

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