ExclusiveAshley Madison CSO Paul Keable Talks ‘Fake Profiles’: ‘The Company Made Mistakes’

The Netflix documentary Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at what happened within the company after the infamous data breach in 2015. The series alleged that many of Ashley Madison’s dating profiles were actually fake and were operated by bots.

“Clearly the company made mistakes in our past,” Ashley Madison Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable exclusively tells In Touch. “That program was already in the process of being shut down prior to 2015. So it was not an operation in 2014, 2015 in Canada, the U.S. and Australia, and our business continued to grow. So, clearly there was more going on than what people want to believe.”

Keable continues, “I’m not dismissing the mistakes of the past. What I’m saying is that that program is used as a cudgel to say that there was no truth or veracity to the site. We actually had Ernst and Young, the huge auditing firm, come in to verify that there are no fake corporate bots on our platform, and that report is public.”

In Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, a former Ashley Madison ambassador, revealed that in 2011 a man showed up to her dressing room where she was working as an exotic dancer.

“This guy just pops in with flowers, and he comes up to talk to me,” McGee recalled. “He was looking at me like he knew me.”

At the time, McGee thought the gentleman was simply a fan, but a nearly-identical incident happened a couple of weeks later.

“He was like he was my boyfriend and he was just popping in to see me,” McGee continued. “Then, I asked the guy, ‘Hey, can you remind me how I know you?’ He’s like, ‘Well, we talk on the website.’”

When she asked the man to explain further, he said that he was under the impression that he and McGee had been having conversations on Ashley Madison. It wasn’t until a third man showed up to speak to McGee when she said it all “clicked.”

When McGee was an ambassador for Ashley Madison, she said that the concept of her being a customer on the site was “driven in hard.”

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I put my picture on there; it’s from my email address,” McGee told producers. “These guys have not only seen my profile on Ashley Madison, but they actually think they’re talking to me. There’s somebody pretending to be me on the website.”

The documentary claimed that many of the fake profiles’ IP addresses were traced to an Ashley Madison office in the U.K.

Former Vice President of Sales Evan Back claimed that bots were created using AI technology that would reach out to male customers once they realized the man was too shy to reach out themselves.