The fallout from the hacking of the adultery website Ashley Madison has drifted nearer to the courtroom after two Canadian solicitors’ firms said they had launched a £368m lawsuit against the owners.
Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg, both of Ontario, said they had filed a class-action on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to Ashley Madison and whose personal information was disclosed to the public.
The suit, filed on Thursday, targets Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media, two Toronto companies behind AshleyMadison.com.
The plaintiff was named as Eliot Shore, an Ottawa widower, who says 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.
The class-action status “still needs to be certified by the court”, the firms’ statement said.
The breach exposed an estimated 39 million members of the website, whose slogan advises them that “life is short, have an affair”. Hackers stole users’ names, emails, home addresses and message history, and made it public earlier this week.
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The Canadian law firms’ statement said numerous former users of the website had approached them, many of whom had paid a “kill fee” to wipe all personal information from the website before the breach occurred.
Mr Charney said: “They are outraged that Ashley Madison 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.
The firms said they were not suing the hackers, who said they attacked the website in an effort to close it down as punishment for collecting a fee without actually deleting users’ data.
The file comes after lawyers in Missouri filed a class-action lawsuit in the US District Court seeking more than £3.2m in damages on behalf of an unnamed female plaintiff.
Ashley Madison did not respond to requests for comment about the Canadian lawsuit.
