Two Canadian law firms have confirmed that they are filing a $578 million class action lawsuit against the two companies that run Ashley Madison after a hacker group followed through on their promise to reveal the info of about 39 million members earlier this week.
Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP, both of Ontario, said Friday that they filed the lawsuit on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to Ashley Madison and whose personal information was disclosed to the public, according to CNBC.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, names Avid Dating Life Inc. and Avid Life Media Inc., as the defendant in the case, reported The New York Daily News. Coincidentally, the hackers, who claim that they attacked the website in an effort to close it down as punishment for collecting a fee without actually deleting users' data, haven't been named in the lawsuit.
The plaintiff, Eliot Shore, an Ottawa widower, said that he joined the website for a short time in search of companionship after he lost his wife to breast cancer. He claims to never have cheated nor met up with any members of the site.
The class-action argues that the privacy of Canadian members was breached in July when hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison's website and downloaded private information, including users' personal names, emails, home addresses and message history, according to the Associated Press.
Since the leak, many have come forward asking about their privacy rights under Canadian law.
"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," lawyer Ted Charney said.
The data, stored in more than 2,500 files, pertained to transactions spanning from March 2008 to early June 2015, and many appear to be linked to federal, provincial and municipal workers across Canada, as well as to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the military.
The data breach revealed that some of the website's customers made credit-card transactions from computers attached to the Department of National Defense and Canada's House of Commons.
The adultery website declined to comment about the charges, claiming that the personal details exposed in the initial data leak can't be used to prove the infidelity of their clients.
