Affairs

Hot on the heels of Match’s announcement that its new service, Ask Match, will make dating coaches available for one-on-one phone sessions, Ashley Madison is planning a coaching service of its own. The dating site for affair seekers recently revealed it has been testing a "cheating coaches" feature in Brazil and the United States since March of this year.

Hiring a coach to improve your romantic game is nothing new, but Ashley Madison may be the first to apply the idea to infidelity. The feature will allow users to search for an available coach through the mobile app, then purchase time with them via a credits system. Each credit costs around 50 cents, according to Business Insider. A continuous conversation with a coach will set you back eight credits.

Is your partner a doctor? A Libertarian? Obsessed with tattoos? If so, a series of surveys from married dating site Ashley Madison says they may be more likely to cheat.

As the world’s foremost experts in affairs, with more than 39 million users in 53 countries, the folks at Ashley Madison know a thing or two about infidelity. Several studies conducted by the company this year reveal the secrets of America’s cheaters, including who’s most likely to be unfaithful, what they’re attracted to when they do it, and which partners are most likely to forgive an adulterous indiscretion.

One survey determined the professions that are most likely to stray. The most common jobs for cheating women are in the medical field (nurses/doctors). “A combination of long hours of potential stress mixed with a natural reaction to stress just might be the reason these women in the medical profession seek out an affair,” reports Ashley Madison.

Augmented Reality is the future of dating, at least according to the folks at Feeld. The company whose original app was marketed to those interested in threesomes is betting their new app Signal will be revolutionary for the online dating market.

Signal will hit the market in the summer of 2018 according to Feeld. It works by giving members access to a secret location visible through the app, allowing them to meet people this way instead of endless matching and messaging.

The company notes that most dating apps operate in a way that is counterproductive to what people want. Instead of encouraging folks to meet in real life and leave the app, the apps have created a game-like stickiness. App users become addicted to swiping and being on the app rather than pursuing “real-life” relationships.

Life’s short, have an affair. But for the love of two-timing tricksters everywhere, don’t do it on Ashley Madison.

Following the catastrophic hack that hit the company in 2015, the dating site for extramarital action is in hot water again - this time for exposing a large portion of its cheating clientele’s private photos.

A team of security researchers has revealed that “poor technical and logical implementations” has left many images from Ashley Madison users vulnerable to exposure online. Due to these flaws, they wrote in a report, approximately 64% of the site’s private (and often explicit) pictures are accessible.

Cheating. Adultery. Stepping out. Having an affair. Two-timing. Infidelity. Extracurricular activities.

We have a number of words for it, and an equally plentiful number of excuses for doing it. A new survey from Ashley Madison, the infamous online dating service that caters to extramarital encounters and claims more than 56 million members worldwide, has uncovered the most common reasons people cheat on their partners.

Ashley Madison teamed up with YourTango to ask 1,300 male and female respondents about how and why they partake in their illicit affairs. You may think the answer is simple - one too many drinks, and suddenly otherwise-attached strangers are hooking up in a grungy bar bathroom - but in fact, the act is often more premeditated than that.

Big changes and big problems are on their way for Ashley Madison. The hits keep coming after the adultery dating site’s high-profile hack last year.

First, the bad news. Ashley Madison is back in hot water thanks to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation and a flood of lawsuits over the site’s use of “fembots” to lure cheating men. An Ernst and Young report confirmed that Avid Life Media, owner of Ashley Madison, used fake dating profiles to impersonate women and scam unwitting male users into entering their credit card information.

According to Gizmodo, Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots in a “sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud.” The faux females would initiate chats with men by saying things like “Hmmmm, when I was younger I used to sleep with my friend’s boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard although I could never sleep with their husbands.”

Avid claims it shut down the bot accounts in the United States, Canada and Australia in 2014, and by late 2015 in the rest of the world. However, some U.S. users say they exchanged messages with foreign fembots until late in 2015. Now a handful of such users have filed class action suits against the company.

A recent statement from Avid Life Media indicates how the company plans to proceed. The statement announces "a new direction and total repositioning" of the service, with newly appointed chief executive Rob Segal and president James Millership at the helm.

"Our new team is committed to taking care of our members and to building on our portfolio of unique and open-minded online dating brands," said Millership. "Millions of people have continued to connect on our sites during the past year and they deserve a discreet, open-minded community where they can connect with like-minded individuals."

Millership reinforced that bots will no longer be used at Avid Life Media and Ashley Madison. The company has also stepped up security and hired a cyber-security team to implement new safeguards and monitoring. Both Millership and Segal say they do not know the focus of the FTC investigation.

Former users of Ashley Madison may notice other key changes. The site has undergone significant makeover, with a new “look and feel” that is distinctly less obvious about the adultery theme.

"Ashley Madison today is about so much more than infidelity, it's about all kinds of adult dating," the website says. It remains to be seen if its 46 million members agree.