The wages of sin.
After hackers of Ashley Madison (AM) made public the personal information of the adultery website’s 37 million subscribers, including their names, email addresses, and sexual fantasies, two subscribers apparently committed suicide.
Some of those subscribers actually used their work email addresses, as shown by the many addresses that end in .gov, .mil, a company name (WellsFargo), a university name (UTexas), and even the United Nations. (See “Pentagon/FBI investigate Ashley Madison hack, in fear of blackmail of government subscribers to adultery site”)
The Daily Mail reports, Aug. 24, 2015, that Captain Michael Gorhum, who had served for 25 years with the San Antonio Police Department in Texas, took his own life just days after hackers published his email using the official San Antonio city e-address.
Gorhum’s email address was one of three San Antonio city official email addresses which were leaked as part of the Ashley Madison, the IBTimes reports.
At a press conference on Monday, Aug. 24, Canadian police confirmed a second suicide of a man also believed to have been using AM. Police are investigating if the deaths are as a direct result of the leak of AM users.
Thus far, “famous” AM subscribers who are outed include Josh Duggar of the pious Duggar family; two reality TV dudes (whose names I don’t recognize, nor will you); and Jeff Ashton, the state attorney of Florida’s Orange and Osceola counties who gained national attention as the prosecutor in the unsuccessful murder prosecution of Casey Anthony.
The latest on Josh “Porky Pig” Duggar: He’s entered rehab. A porn star/stripper, Danica Dillon, says she had sex with Josh on two separate occasions, when Josh’s wife was pregnant with their 4th child. Dillon says Josh did not make contact with her on AM. Instead, he had approached her in a strip club. (InTouch Weekly)
Ashton said he is resigning his post after being revealed as an Ashley Madison user, but insists he had committed no crime and never followed through with an affair on the cheating website. He choked up several times during a news conference while publicly apologizing to his wife, their three children and his four adult children from previous marriages.
The Ashley Madison leak has already resulted in lawsuits filed against the company. A family lawyer described it as ‘Christmas in September’ for the industry.
Canadian widower Eliot Shore, who joined the site after his wife of 30 years died of cancer, is leading a £368 million lawsuit against Ashley Madison and demanding £4.8 million in damages after his details were published on the internet.
Ashley Madison is offering a $500,000 bounty to anyone who names the hackers and helps police secure a conviction against them.
Gawker’s Gabrielle Bluestone discovered there are only three ZIP codes in all of America which are untainted by Ashley Madison in that there is no record of AM users in those places.
But, wait. Those 3 zip codes are not in AM only because of their sparse population and lack of Internet service. They are:
- Nikolai, Alaska (zip code 99691) — Population: 94 (2010 Census)
- Perryville, Alaska (99648) — Population: 113 (2010 Census)
- Polvadera, New Mexico (87828) — Population:269 (2010 Census)
Read more about those 3 zip codes here.
Meanwhile, the enterprising editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz, took a detailed look at the leaked data, and concluded that most of Ashley Madison’s female accounts are fake. From Yahoo!Celebrity:
The official numbers from the site showed that 31 million of the accounts belonged to men while 5 million supposedly were linked to females. However, Newitz…found that a whopping 10,000 accounts were created with the Ashleymadison.com email, implying that they were test subscriptions. Nine thousand of those 10,000 belonged to women, while the remaining numbers were either categorized as male or no gender specified….
Ashley Madison was fueled by a façade of fake accounts. “What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison…isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives,” the tech editor wrote. “It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots… When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy….
Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created. Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments…. Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.“
In other words, Ashley Madison was a gigantic con game of its founder-CEO Noel Biderman.
The families of police captain Michael Gorhum and the Canadian suicide man should sue Noel Biderman.
H/t FOTM’s Anon
~Éowyn
