Extramarital online dating service Ashley Madison became quite popular after being hacked recently. However, leak of personal data is not the only thing that disappointed its users. The company had to hit back at claims that it filled the service with fake female profiles: Ashley Madison claimed that almost 3m messages were sent by women in the last week alone.

After the largest hack this past summer, the hackers made the full database of Ashley Madison users publicly available. And analysis of that database suggested that almost all the female profiles were fake: some observers pointed out that there were at most about 12 000 of real profiles who were active on Ashley Madison.

Such allegation was criticized both by the website owners and users. If true, it would have meant that there was 1 woman for every 2,700 men. However, this would be at odds with the many men claiming to have met real women on the website easily enough. The website also criticized the researchers who made such assumptions, saying they were misled with the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data.

In respond, the industry experts reported that new evidence found from the leak allowed to suggest that Ashley Madison created over 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages. This would make use of one of the unusual features of the website – that men have to pay to read or send messages.

The owners of the website has not responded to the latest allegations. However, earlier they announced they continue day-to-day operations even while dealing with the theft of its users’ private data. Ashley Madison claimed the site was becoming more and more popular – for example, over 85,000 women signed up for the Ashley Madison platform over the past week alone.