LOS ANGELES — Eight people across the U.S. who registered to use Ashley Madison are suing the website for cheaters after hackers released personal and detailed information of millions of users, including financial data and sexual proclivities.
The lawsuits were filed between last month and Monday by Ashley Madison users in California, Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Tennessee and Minnesota. They all seek class-action status to represent the estimated 37 million registered users of Ashley Madison.
The lawsuits, which seek unspecified damages, say Ashley Madison failed to take reasonable steps to protect the security of its users, including those who paid a special fee to have their information deleted.
Last month, hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison’s website and downloaded private information. The details were posted online.
“Needless to say, this dumping of sensitive personal and financial information is bound to have catastrophic effects on the lives of the website’s users,” according to a lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of an anonymous Los Angeles man.
Attorney Julian Hammond, who says his Baltimore firm has litigated class-action lawsuits against companies like Google, Apple and Hulu, said the Ashley Madison breach is unprecedented.
The website’s users are worried not only about identity theft but about the embarrassment of the release of intimate sexual preferences.
Avid Life Media, the Toronto-based company that owns Ashley Madison, is offering a $500,000 Canadian (U.S. $378,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of members of a group that hacked the site.
“We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world,” the company said last week.
The U.S. litigation follows a $578 million lawsuit filed in Canada last week, also seeking class-action status.
The hackers who took responsibility for Ashley Madison’s data breach have said they attacked the website in an effort to close it down as punishment for collecting a $19 fee without actually deleting users’ data.
On Monday, Canadian police said the hack has triggered extortion crimes and led to two unconfirmed reports of suicides.
The credit-card information of U.S. government workers – some with sensitive jobs in Washington – was revealed in the breach.
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