Charlestown
and Richmond tops for cheaters
By Will Collette
The hacking of Ashley Madison, a Canadian-based
website for married adults willing to pay a monthly
subscription fee to look to extra-marital sex, has gotten a lot of media
buzz.
Apparently, the hackers down-loaded all or most of
the names and e-mail addresses of the site’s more than 30 million registered users worldwide.
The list itself has been published on and off the
web – moving around, appearing and disappearing.
But the list is now in enough hands that lots of
data is being developed from the Ashley Madison hack to expose a number of conservative
hypocrites (among them Josh
Duggar).
The data-crunching reports also give you some
surprising insights into where people who are looking to a little something,
something on the side are concentrated.
Charlestown, to my amazement, is one
such surprising place. So is our neighbor Richmond. And I'm NOT making any of this up.
Sure, it’s a shock to see Alabama top the US list for rankings of the states, just as it is not a surprise that Colorado and Washington, DC came in second and third. Rhode Island came in 14th.
The local Patch news
web sites are running their own story that lists
the top twenty Rhode Island communities with residents looking to Ashley
Madison for hook-ups.
That list of twenty is:
Gross number of entries in Ashley Madison's database |
- Providence – 13,061
- Newport – 9,461
- Warwick – 5,943
- Cumberland – 4,273
- Barrington – 3,926
- Cranston – 3,409
- Pawtucket – 3,160
- Smithfield – 2,974
- Richmond – 2,266
- Charlestown – 2,251
- Woonsocket – 2,065
- Coventry – 1,852
- West Warwick – 1,411
- North Kingstown – 1,219
- Westerly – 1,110
- East Providence – 1,021
- East Greenwich - 958
- Hopkinton – 832
- North Providence - 707
- Narragansett – 682
Richmond and Charlestown rank only #9 and #10 in
terms of the total number of Ashley Madison subscribers. But when you break it
down on a per capita basis, we blow away the rest of the field.
Obviously Providence, as RI’s most populous city,
ranks #1 with 13.061 paid subscribers. Bearing in mind that the Ashley Madison
site is aimed at married people who want to cheat, the pool of likely
subscribers are the 47,328 Providence residents who are currently married according
to the US Census and maybe the 18,490 who are separated or divorced.
Doing the math, it looks like one out of every five (19.8%)
married, separated or divorced Providence residents appear to subscribe to
Ashley Madison.
Now let’s do the numbers for Richmond and
Charlestown.
The Census
shows Richmond has 3,640 residents who are currently
married and another 653 who are divorced or separated for a total of 4,293
potential Ashley Madison subscribers.
With 2,266 actual subscribers, more than half of
potential Richmond subscribers signed up – 53%!
In Charlestown, the Census
numbers show 3,809 currently married and another 596 who
are separated or divorced for a total potential Ashley Madison subscriber pool
of 4,405.
Of those 2,251 actually subscribed. That’s 51% of
the potential pool of customers
But there’s a twist. According
to CBS News, of the 31 million Ashley Madison subscribers, only
5.5 million of the members are women (about 18%).
But even that 4:1 male to female ratio is doubtful.
Other number crunchers have determined that most of
the female entries are faked (with some on-line
sex entrepreneurs hiring staff to post Ashley Madison profiles to lure men to pay-sites for cyber-sex).
Further, the stolen data also allowed number-crunchers
to analyze actual usage and lo and behold, almost
no women actually use the Ashley Madison site. Of the chat system users, only
0.02% are women. Of those members who checked for replies, only 0.007% are
women.
Actual usage, broken down by gender. You have to wonder WHO IS IT all those guys are talking to? |
Thus it appears that 99.9% of Ashley Madison users are men.
If we assume that 99.9% of Richmond’s and
Charlestown’s Ashley Madison subscribers are men, here’s what you get.
In Richmond, there are 2,570 men aged 18 to 64 and
another 362 who are 65 and older, for a total of 2,932 adult men. There are
2,266 Ashley Madison subscribers in Richmond, making it seem like four out of
five Richmond guys are members.
In Charlestown, 2,409 are men aged 18 to 64, plus
another 662 older men for a total of 3,071. There are 2,251 Ashley Madison
subscribers or theoretically three out of four Charlestown men.
Despite the hack and the risk of humiliation that
has already led to at least two suicides, Ashley Madison reports that people
are still signing up in droves, according to the BBC,
and “hundreds of thousands” signed up just last week alone.
As you might expect, there is a lot of advice
and assistance going on-line to help Ashley Madison subscribers to
find out if they’ve been hacked or outed by the theft of the website’s data.
Microsoft security specialist Troy Hunt created a web tool haveibeenpwned.com
to allow you to check to see if your e-mail address or someone you know was on
the list stolen by the hackers on any website (not just Ashley Madison). The
site can also tell you if your e-mail has been “pasted” – meaning posted on the
web illicitly.
I have not seen the actual list to see who among our
local paragons of virtue have signed up, but inevitably, there is a good chance
the list will be republished.
I say with total certainty that I’m not a
subscriber. For one thing, I’m too cheap. For another, Cathy has often told me
that when men my age start hanging out on social media, they do so to troll for
women. That’s why, to the amazement of many of my friends, I am not even on
Facebook.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a lot of
jumped up, holier-than-thou solid Charlestown citizens whose name and e-mail
addresses are on that list.