When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.

Source: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

The question is, how do you find fakes in a sea of data? Answering that becomes more difficult when you consider that even real users of Ashley Madison were probably giving fake information at least some of the time. But wholesale fakery still leaves its traces in the profile data. I spoke with a data scientist who studies populations, who told me to compare the male and female profiles in aggregate, and look for anomalous patterns.