A couple of Canadian companies have filed suit against the firms that run the adultery website Ashley Madison, alleging a massive privacy-rights infraction occurred when hackers released personal information on clients and as such, the outfit should cough up $578 million in damages and fines.
Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP, two firms operating out of Canada, filed the suit on behalf of a group of Canadians who say their personal information was wrongfully breached. The suit, which still has to be certified by the court before it can go forward, specifically names Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media, the two companies that run the adultery website, Ashley Madison, as defendants, Time reported.
“Numerous former users of AshleyMadison.com have approached the law firms to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian law,” the law firms said in a statement. “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.”
Ashley Madison responded to the hack in previous statements by saying its members – and there were an estimated 39 million of them – can’t be proven to have actually engaged in extramarital affairs.
This suit, brought by Eliot Shore, who said he joined the site after his wife died from breast cancer, has been wedded to another class action filed in July in Missouri. The Missouri suit seeks $5 million and was filed by a female who said she paid $19 to Ashley Madison to delete her personal information, but it never was, Time reported.
Also Monday, investigators said they’re looking into three recent suicides in Texas and Canada as possibly tied to the hack of the site.
San Antonio police captain Michael Gorhum, who has 25 years on the force, killed himself last week shortly after his email address popped up during searches of the adultery site, the International Business Times reported. It’s not clear Gorhum committed suicide due to the revelation, or if he was even actually using the site, however.
And in Toronto, staff superintendent Bryce Evans of the city’s police force said two suicides have been unofficially linked to the adultery website, but not confirmed. The New York Daily News said police have also received reports of hate crimes due to the site, too.
“Your actions are illegal and won’t be tolerated,” said Evans about a case also now being investigated by Canada’s privacy commissioner.
Evans at a recent press conference said Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, has come forward with a reward offer of $500,000 for information “that leads to the identification, arrest and prosecution of the person or persons responsible for the hack,” he said, the New York Daily News said.
“This hack is one of the largest data breaches in the world,” Evans said, the newspaper reported. “This is affecting all of us. The social impact behind this leak, we’re talking about families, we’re talking about children, we’re talking about wives, their male partners.”
One such hacked individual, Jeffrey Ashton, the Florida prosecutor in the Casey Anthony murder case, said he held membership in the site, but denied ever going through with an adulterous act.
“I never let it get that far,” said Ashton, who serves as state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties, the New York Daily News reported.
“While no laws were broken,” he went on, in a recent press conference, “they were incredibly stupid choices.
Ashton is married with four children.
More than 30 million email addresses and some credit card data were released as a result of the hack last month.
