Ashley Madison says cheating site still growing

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Despite a massive hack that exposed the personal information of millions of users, the Ashley Madison dating site for married people is growing, the company says.

"Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated," Avid Life Media, said in a release Monday.

The dating website for married people was breached in July by a hacker or hackers calling themselves the Impact Team. Customer files and databases from the site were posted online Aug. 18.

The company's CEO, Noel Biderman, stepped down on Friday.

None of this is dampening customer interest, the Toronto-based company said Monday.

In a statement emailed to media, Avid Life Media said in the past week alone "hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform — including 87,596 women."

The number of women on the site has been at issue. One of the reasons the Impact Team gave for breaching AshleyMadison.com was that it was a scam, that there were almost no real women on the site.

In the database posted online, there were about 31 million accounts marked as male and 5.5 million marked as female.

However, an analysis of the hacked database by the tech media site Gizmodo last week seemed to find that a high proportion of the female accounts were not being used by real people. It found that 20 million of the male accounts had checked their Ashley Madison messages at least once, while just 2,492 women had.

In its email Monday, Avid Life Media seemed to dispute that analysis. "Last week alone, women sent more than 2.8 million messages within our platform," the statement said.

The company went on to say that in the first half of 2015, "the ratio of male members who paid to communicate with women on our service versus the number of female members who actively used their account (female members are not required to pay to communicate with men on Ashley Madison) was 1.2 to 1."

Avid Life Media declined to comment beyond its written statement.

In 2013 an employee of Avid Life Media sued the company, saying she'd gotten repetitive stress injuries creating fake female accounts on the site.

According to the National Post in Canada, Doriana Silva was hired to create 1,000 fake profiles for women in three weeks. The posts were in Portuguese and were meant to help launch a Brazilian Ashley Madison site.

Avid Life Media then countersued Silva, saying she kept copies of confidential documents that bellowed to it, the National Post reported. The lawsuit was dismissed in January.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Elizabeth Weise on Twitter: @eweise.