Thank you, Paul Tall, for your further expert input. These are deep and murky waters.
Meanwhile …
THE NATIONAL CYBER SECURITY CENTRE Sadly all that my and others' researches can do is warn potential users of Secret Benefits and Sugar Daddy who may see this thread. I wish I had the energy and know-how to get the sites taken down.
However I slightly suspect that in reality no-one could achieve this. Indeed, if it were relatively easy to get sites like this removed, presumably Seeking (which I believe to be an honest company) would have done so, since SB must take a lot of its business.
In this context, this page is of interest:
External Link/Members OnlyIt would appear that the focus of the National Cyber Security Centre is, understandably, to try to remove websites that are involved in what might be described as Level 1 scamming – phishing, malicious activity, scam e-mails, texts and phone-calls, theft of credit card details, and so on. Level 2 scamming, such as SB engages in, would be a lower priority, and indeed be quite hard to prove. We now more or less know what’s going on, but without access to SB’s back systems (or a whistle-blower who defects) it would be difficult to prove.
POSSIBLE PARALLELS BETWEEN ASHLEY MADISON'S MODUS OPERANDI AND THAT OF SECRET BENEFITSMeanwhile, I have been re-reading the Wikipedia article about the Ashley Madison website, which is of much interest – and, since I suspect few users of UKP will have clicked on the link I gave in post #147, I will quote here some excerpts from the article.
Although Ashley Madison is not owned by the Secret Benefits / Sugar Daddy outfit, the fact that the site comes third in most categories on sugardaddysites.pro suggests that that two firms have a friendly and collegiate relationship.
One reason the sites would be happy to work together is that they are not direct rivals – Ashley Madison is not a Sugar Babe site as such, but is in the business of facilitating adulterous relationships. Its tag-line is: “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Anyway, in 2015, following the theft by hackers of all Ashley Madison’s customer data, the site was found to have been engaging in exactly the kind of nefarious activity that SB appears still to engage in.
Wikipedia takes up the story. (The emboldenings and the comments inside square brackets are mine.)
On July 15, 2015, hackers stole all of its customer data — including emails, names, home addresses, sexual fantasies and credit card information — and threatened to post the data online if Ashley Madison and fellow Avid Life Media site Established Men were not permanently closed. By July 22, the first set of customer names was released by hackers, with all of the user data released on August 18, 2015. More data (including some of the CEO's emails) was released on August 20, 2015. The release included data from customers who had previously paid a $19 fee to Ashley Madison to supposedly have their data deleted. The fee was also applied to people who had accounts set up against their will, as a workplace prank, or because of a mistyped email address.
According to Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, who has analyzed the 2015 leaked data, Ashley Madison had over 70,000 bots sending fake female messages to male users. She had previously released an analysis purporting to show that only a minuscule proportion (12,000 out of 5.5 million) of registered female accounts were used on a regular basis, but she has subsequently disavowed this analysis, saying that from the data released there is no way of determining how many women actually used the service. [Although Newitz had to "row back" from this allegation, it remains intriguing.]
Newitz noted a clause in the terms of service which states that "many profiles are for 'amusement only'".
In July 2016, CEO Rob Segal and newly appointed President James Millership told Reuters that the company had phased out bots by late 2015.
Ashley Madison employs guerrilla marketing techniques to advertise its site. One such technique has been the creation of fake criticism [that is, review] websites filled with ads for Ashley Madison and anonymous testimony that the site is legitimate. For example, the site "AshleyMadisonScams.com" was registered to Ashley Madison's owner, Avid Life.
In 2012, the company was sued by former employee Doriana Silva, who stated that in preparation for the launch of the company's Portuguese-language website, she was assigned to create over a thousand bogus member profiles within a three-week period in order to attract paying customers, and that this caused her to develop repetitive strain injury. [Although the case was dismissed, this dismissal related not to a refutation of Silva’s claim that she had been tasked with creating bogus profiles, but to there being doubt as to her injuries having been genuine.]