Ashley Madison leak puts lies to numbers

Cheaters’ site appears well short of claimed 189,000 accounts

It was the stat that no one really believed.

For months now, the online infidelity service Ashley Madison has claimed it has more than 189,000 active accounts in Ottawa — or onefifth of the city’s entire population.

That such a huge swath of straitlaced Ottawa society could be actively engaging in a website with the tag line, “Life is short. Have an affair,” stretched the limits of credulity for those who live here, and the world at large.

Comedian John Oliver mocked the dubious stat on his U.S. television show. “Ottawa, you cannot let this skeezy website destroy your marriages. Don’t take this lying down beneath some mulleted stranger wearing a wedding band,” he said in a segment featuring a montage of hockey players, a moose and middle-aged men raking their lawns.

Now, this week’s monstrous data dump detailing the intimate details of Ashley Madison clients gives us not just a unique glimpse at the inner workings of the controversial service, but casts doubt on the idea that Ottawa is the cheating capital of the world.

An analysis of the leaked data shows that between April and June, only about 1,200 people from Ottawa paid to access the website using a credit card.

According to the data, 487 Ottawa residents paid with a credit card to access Ashley Madison’s online service in April. In May, the company had a total of 453 paying subscribers in Ottawa. Partial results for June — the data include transactions for 14 dates between June 1 and June 28 — show another 189 transactions were recorded to Ottawa credit cards. The number of actual paying accounts reflected in the documents is even lower once repeat customers are removed, since many clients paid into their accounts month-to-month.

These numbers are a far cry from 189,000.

A spokesman for the website this week defended its claims about the extent of active accounts in Ottawa. He said the information leaked online details only a partial number of payments received by the website and that it accepts other forms of payment, including PayPal, which was not hacked.

Even so, the company’s claims that the capital is a cheater’s haven remain questionable. The city has a population of 883,000 and if Ashley Madison’s numbers were true, that would suggest as many as one in five Ottawa residents are on the site.

Remove children under 19 — who account for 25 per cent of the population — from the equation and Ottawa’s rate of online adultery jumps to more than one in four.

Looked at another way, married or common-law relationships are found in only 200,000 households in Ottawa, according to Statistics Canada. If the Ashley Madison numbers were true, then at least one partner in the vast majority of couples in Ottawa was engaging in the cheating website.

So what might explain the supposed surfeit of Ottawa-related accounts? It’s hard to know for sure.

Ashley Madison is free to join — and free for women to use — but men who want to interact with any of the site members must purchase “credits.” Packages range from $49 to $149 and offer varying amounts of credits. The site also offers a $259 “affair guarantee” package that gives the buyer 1,000 credits.

So some people may have signed up out of curiosity, but never actually engaged in anything on the site.

And then there’s the possibility that a large number of those 189,000 accounts were not created by the person whose name is associated with the account.

The spokesman for Ashley Madison, who refused to be named, confirmed that the company does not verify the email addresses associated with accounts. This means a person could claim being in Ottawa even if he or she is only flying in for a business trip, and there is no way Ashley Madison could tell.

Finally, numerous users have multiple accounts on Ashley Madison for a variety of reasons, according to the company.

It’s not the first time the company’s member count has been questioned.

In 2013 a Toronto woman, Doriana Silva, launched a lawsuit against parent company Avid Life Media Inc., alleging she was hired to write Portuguese-language profiles for the Brazilian version of the site. She claimed the company paid her $34,000 to create 1,000 “fake female profiles.” Silva sought $20 million in damages. Avid Life Media called the legal action frivolous. The lawsuit, as well as a countersuit filed by Avid Life, were dismissed by courts in January.

The data windfall, which was released by a hacker or hackers calling themselves the Impact Team, first hit the Internet on Wednesday. Another batch, twice as large as the original dump, was uploaded Thursday.

The Wednesday release, which was compressed but still came in at more than 10 gigabytes (the equivalent of more than two Blu-ray discs worth of text documents), claimed to contain the information of 36 million Ashley Madison accounts, including passwords and user data such as sexual preferences.

The data also included details of credit card payments made between March 21, 2008, and June 28, 2015. The credit card payments have been grouped into daily transaction files.

However, full credit card numbers and verification codes (the three digit code on the back of the card) were not included, making it unlikely anyone affected by the breach will see their credit card numbers stolen and used by others online.

Fearing backlash and an impact to their image, many users of the website have flooded online news sharing sites, such as Reddit, to discuss how to handle the fallout from the leak. Reddit has had to close numerous threads about the topic or make them “private” to try to allow affected Ashley Madison users to discuss the situation without attracting more attention to themselves.

A class-action lawsuit was filed on Friday on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to the service, naming Ottawa man Eliot Shore as the lead plaintiff.

However, the breach raises other concerns that few have thought about, including the potential for physical harm that could accompany volatile revelations about cheating spouses.

“This is just a mess. This is very, very disturbing,” said Sam Trosow, a professor in the Faculty of Law at Western University in London, Ont. “It’s not only sensitive information, it’s information that could be so harmful to you and others around you and the fact that this company did not safeguard this information is absolutely outrageous.”