At least four lawsuits have been filed in the US against the cheating web site Ashley Madison, each of them battling it out for class-action status.

Two were filed this month in California, another one was filed in Texas, and a fourth was filed in July in Missouri. Another suit was filed last week in Canada, where Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media is based. That suit is being brought by a former Ashley Madison customer named Eliot Shore. Shore maintains that he briefly signed up with the site after his wife died of breast cancer but never met with anyone and never cheated on his wife. Shore is seeking $578 million in damages.

The US suits have all been filed by anonymous plaintiffs Jane Doe or John Doe, and allege that Ashley Madison and Avid Life Media are in breach of contract, engaged in negligence in protecting customer data and violated various state privacy laws. They say the companies knew their networks were insecure, an allegation that appears to be supported by internal documents and emails leaked by the Impact Team, the hackers who have taken responsibility for the breach. Internal discussions show that the Avid Life knew about vulnerabilities in their networks, including "technical issues that could lead to a data breach occurring, as well the legal problems that may come with that," notes one of the lawsuits.

In addition, the Missouri suit states that its anonymous plaintiff paid a $19 fee to have Ashley Madison delete her personal information from its servers but failed to deliver on that service.

Courts will have to decide which of the US lawsuits gets class-action status, if any—which would mean that any other lawsuit filed against Ashley Madison alleging similar violations would be absorbed into that single case.