Cheaters never prosper?
An unnamed individual living in the U.S. has filed a federal lawsuit against Ashely Madison, a website that facilitates affairs among married men and women, and parent firm Avid Life Media Inc., which is based in Toronto, Canada. The suit alleges negligence, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress.
Avid Life Media Inc. was already hit with a class-action lawsuit in Canada last week that's seeking around $760 million in damages. The U.S.-based lawsuit also seeks class-action status, with unspecified damages.
Both lawsuits are the result of a recent security breach in which a hacking group known as the Impact Team stole and ultimately published "highly sensitive personal, financial, and identifying information of the website's some 37 million users," according to court documents.
After stealing the data, the Impact Team threatened to disclose the information it obtained if Avid Life Media Inc. failed to shut down Ashley Madison. At the time, it appeared that the Impact Team was equally perturbed with Ashley Madison's $19 fee that purports to erase all details about a customer, which the hacking group claimed was misleading, and the fact that the site encourages extramarital affairs.
"Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn't deliver. We've got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we'll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online," the hackers said at the time.
The hackers made good on their threat last week when they dumped nearly 10GB of data for all the web to see. In a note accompanying the data dump, the Impact Team said "the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles."
According to Reuters, the collection of data included email addresses and other information belonging to government officials and high-level executives at European and North American corporations.
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