Ashley Madison, the website for men who think they are meeting women to have affairs with, is apparently unfazed by a massive breach of its users' personal data and the resignation last week of its founder.
In a statement Monday, the company said -- against all logic -- that it's continuing to grow.
"Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," the statement reads. "Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing. This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform – including 87,596 women."
The press release also lashes out at journalists who reported on information from the hack earlier this month. That hack revealed personal details about the infidelity website's 37 million users, as well as data suggesting that more than 31 million of those users were men.
Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison, maintains that many women continue to use the platform. Here's what that chunk of the statement says:
Some journalists have turned the focus of the criminal act against Ashley Madison inside out, attacking us instead of the hackers. Last week, a reporter who claimed to analyze the stolen data made incorrect assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data. This reporter concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on those assumptions. That conclusion was wrong.
Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform. Furthermore, in the first half of this year the ratio of male members who paid to communicate with women on our service versus the number of female members who actively used their account (female members are not required to pay to communicate with men on Ashley Madison) was 1.2 to 1. These numbers are the main reason that Ashley Madison is the number one service for people seeking discrete relationships.
A representative for Avid Life declined to comment when asked by The Huffington Post about how many of those messages came from confirmed, human women. A report from The Washington Post alleges that the company fabricated female profiles to hook men on its lucrative premium services.
Women don't need to pay anything to message men on Ashley Madison, so you can imagine how easy it is to inflate the numbers. HuffPost managed to create a fake "female seeking male" profile on the website in about two minutes. Men, on the other hand, must purchase credits in order to send private messages to ladies.
But, in fairness, when it comes to titillating messages, a fake name and profile picture might do just fine.
"Approximately 70 percent of our revenue on any given day is from members making repeat purchases," Avid Life's press release says. "We think that shows happy customers on a consistent basis."
H/T The Week