Well, basically you purchase credits and you spend them every time you message someone...

Not quite... the 'first' time you message somebody, you get charged credits... any additional messages (not chat, mind you, just 'email' messages) to the same person are free. You can also choose to use credits to "prioritize" a message (put it at the top of her pile)... and note THIS IS THE DEFAULT, you have to turn it off in order to avoid it (or else you will burn through your credits like crazy). You will also burn a ton of credits to "chat" with anybody. Literally like $10-20.

The trick is that you will *never* know if the person on the other side of your messages is a real person or just an AM employee trying to get you to burn credits or spend money. There is something that is 'free'... a "wink"... that says "hey sweetie, please check out my profile"... and so far about 100% of the responses are "I don't reply to winks, send me a message"... pretty much guarantees you are not talking to a real woman (customer). Also note, vast majority of their "women" are "one time"... so you will get charged to send a message to somebody that has not been back to the site for months.

Oh, they also have a scam where you can pay extra so that you do not have to burn credits to send somebody a message who as contacted you first... which is totally brain dead because the very few women on this system that are real, get about 100-200 messages per day from horny guys, so that they are NEVER going to initiate contact with anybody.

Read the "good" reviews... mostly women, and if you read closely you see that they are getting a multitude of messages, the 'best' guesses are > 50:1.

The ads were sent by employees of Ashley Madison to get you to burn through your credits and buy more. Also be aware that women never pay to message on Ashley madison