Inspired by the exceptionally hot bot-shot that Akauya kindly posted for us, I went a-googling to see whether the
grands fromages and
bot-meisters of Secret Benefits look anything like that image – and indeed to see what else the internet might throw up about the site.
The information that follows derives from a variety of sources.
Cecelia Truax Basilotto, the CEO of Secret Benefits, bears no resemblance to the bot. She’s an overweight 68-year-old grandmother from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania with grey hair and spectacles. In the photograph of her that I found she’s wearing a baggy red and white floral T-shirt, tight-fitting knee-length blue denim shorts and a pair of trainers.
The owner of Secret Benefits – and Director of Communications – is Herb Rose, who's based in Auckland, New Zealand. Herb's much younger than Cecelia. In the photograph I found of him he looks around 35. Herb clearly fancies himself as a bit of a smoothie: perfectly arranged hair, hand on chin, expensive wrist-watch artfully displayed. I wonder how he and Cecelia know each other, living as they do almost 9,000 miles apart, or how they came up with their cunning plan for fleecing old pervs? Because they seem a rather unlikely pairing. (Incidentally, if anyone would like to tell Herb what they think of his site, he can be e-mailed at
[email protected].)
In January 2021 Secret Benefits had 50 employees worldwide. That would seem to be an awful lot for a website that you would think, once designed, would largely be able to “run itself”. I’d be surprised if Adult Work – a much bigger and more complex site – employs even a quarter of that number.* But what do I know?
Either way, what do those 50 dudes and dudesses
do – other than reply to disgruntled users of the site, post fake positive reviews on the internet, and try to get genuine negative reviews taken down? Perhaps, therefore, not all the scamming activity on Secret Benefits is bot-generated, and there’s more “manual intervention” than I’ve tended to assume.
Postscript*After writing the above, I went back to Google to see if I could find out how many employees Adult Work has. One site told me 28. Another told me 10. So I'm not much the wiser.
