Ashley Madison claims new users are signing up in droves

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The company behind Ashley Madison is doubling down after an embarrassing data breach, claiming “hundreds of thousands” of new users are signing up for the adultery website.

Last month, a group calling itself Impact Team revealed information, including names, email addresses, and credit card information of millions of users. Technology website Gizmodo crunched the numbers and found that not only did men greatly outnumber the women on the site, many of the women had inactive or fake profiles.

Ashley Madison claims it has more than 37 million members around the world. Gizmodo found that there were about 5.55 million women registered to the site, about 15 per cent of the total. However, many of these accounts were inactive. There were approximately 31 million men.

In a statement released Monday, Avid Life, the company behind Ashley Madison, said Gizmodo’s numbers were wrong, and that 87,596 women were part of the “hundreds of thousands of new users” who signed up in the past week alone. The company did not say how many users it had lost during that same period.

A spokesperson for Avid Life also said that in the past week, women sent more than 2.8 million messages.

“Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated,” a statement from Avid Life Media read.

“The company continues its day-to-day operations even as it deals with the theft of its private data by criminal hackers.”

Since the hack, a class-action lawsuit has been launched against Ashley Madison, arguing users’ privacy was breached. The company’s slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.” The website explicitly promises discretion for extramarital affairs.

The lawsuit is claiming that in many cases, the users paid additional fees for the website to remove all of their user data. It is alleged these users discovered that their information was exposed.

The firm also added that the class action is not being brought against the hackers who have claimed responsibility for the leak, Impact Team.

CEO and founder Neil Biderman stepped down last week. At the time, Ashley Madison said it continued to co-operate with police to apprehend those responsible for the hack and had offered a $500,000 reward for anyone with information that results in the identification, arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible.

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