Ashley Madison facing class action suit, extortion attempts

Adultery website facing $US578m lawsuit as users face extortion attempts and one reportedly commits suicide.

Ashley Madison users are also reportedly already facing extortion attempts.

Things are going from bad to worse for online cheating website Ashley Madison, with parent company Avid Life Media now facing a $US578 million class-action lawsuit after personal information of its 37 million users was posted online.

Ontario-based law firms Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strogsberg LLP, said they filed the lawsuit on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to the extramarital relationship service and had their data, including fetishes and credit card information, leaked online.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, targets Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media, the Toronto-based companies that run AshleyMadison.com. Its class-action status “still needs to be certified by the court,” the statement says.

The plaintiff is Eliot Shore, an Ottawa widower. Shore said he joined the website for a short time in search of companionship after he lost his wife to breast cancer. He said he never cheated and never met up with any members of the site.

Lawyer Ted Charney told Associated Press it is the first class-action suit filed against the companies in Canada.

Meanwhile Missouri lawyers have filed a class-action lawsuit in a United States district court seeking more than $US5m in damages. US lawyers filed a statement of claim late last month on behalf of an unnamed female plaintiff who said she ponied up $US19 so Ashley Madison would purge her personal information from its website in a process called a “paid-delete”.

The lawsuit argues that the privacy of Canadian members was breached in July when hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison’s website and downloaded private information. The data breach includes users’ personal names, emails, home addresses and message history. On Tuesday, the information was posted publicly online.

The law firms’ statement said numerous former users of the website have approached them to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian law.

“They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users’ information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that the information was left intact and exposed,” lawyer Ted Charney said.

“The sensitivity of the information is so extreme and the repercussions of this breach are so extreme, it puts the damages faced by members in a completely different category of class-action suits,” said Charney.

Ashley Madison users are also reportedly already facing extortion attempts, with security researcher Brian Krebs, who first reported the hack, quoting an anonymous letter one user received.

“Hello,

Unfortunately, your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I now have your information.

If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins (approx. value $225 USD)

Sending the wrong amount means I won’t know it’s you who paid.

You have 7 days from receipt of this email to send the BTC [bitcoins]. If you need help locating a place to purchase BTC, you can start here…..”

“Extortionists already see easy pickings in the leaked AshleyMadison user database,” Mr Krebs said.

One Ashley Madison user from San Antonio has reportedly committed suicide since the leaks but it is unconfirmed whether his death is linked to the data dump.

The website for “married men and women” to pursue affairs and cheat on their spouse was hacked last month by a group identifying itself as ­Impact Team.

The hackers gained access to personal data of millions of previously anonymous users, threatening to release it all unless parent company Avid Life Media took down the site and its sister enterprise Established Men.

Those sites remained active and Impact Team came good on its threat, releasing the information to the dark web, accessible only through special anonymous browsing software.

With AP.