Ashley Madison earned $1.7M from deceptive removal of member profiles; hackers revealed 36 million accounts
The Impact Team had leaked Avid Life Media's private documents indicating that the company earned $1.7M in 2014 for charging its members $20 for 'full deletion' of their profiles. Along with that, the hackers responsible for the Ashley Madison site attack revealed 36 million user accounts online.
BuzzFeed reported the leaked documents proved that Avid Life Media had earned an added $1.7M last year with its full deletion service which means the website had fooled around 90,000 users.
The document describes one of the website's features - full deletion which is supposedly more than just a deactivation where profiles are only hidden from the search results. It charges $20 to its users with a guarantee to fully remove their profile, photos and message history.
The Impact Team said 'full deletion' of members' profiles is not effective. To attest to that, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday night that hackers revealed Ashley Madison data publicly. It says, "We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data. Find someone you know in here? Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. Chances are your man signed up on the world's biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters. Find yourself in here? It was ALM that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you'll get over it."
The Verge released two of the websites where hackers exposed a 9.7 gigabytes of private information of its 36 million users. Anyone can now confirm if someone they know has an Ashley Madison account. Enter an email into these sites: Trustify or cynic.al.
The dump includes details from payments and credit cards from the Ashley Madison database since 2008. Payment transactions include names, email accounts, amounts and addresses while the credit card shows only the last four numbers which could be a transaction ID or the last four digits of the credit cards.