Local police in Canada say two suicides are being investigated together because of the leak of millions of customer profiles for extramarital dating service

Unconfirmed reports suggest that two people in Toronto have killed themselves over the Ashley Madison hack, local police said in a briefing providing details about the beginning of the leak.

“As of this morning, we have two unconfirmed reports of suicides that are associated because of the leak of Ashley Madison customers’ profiles,” Toronto police service staff superintendent Bryce Evans said at a press conference on Monday.

Evans said the nature of the dating site for married people was “of no interest to us as the investigative teams”.

Security analyst Brian Krebs said last week he feared exactly that outcome. “There’s a very real chance that people are going to overreact. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this, and obviously piling on with ridicule and trying to out people is not gonna help the situation,” Krebs, who first reported the hack, said on Wednesday.

The hack, in which some 33m profiles from the service were published online, has been the focus of extortion and phishing attempts. Among them are “hack checking” websites that compile the emails of the curious entered into them and then send malicious software to those emails.

Evans also said that a new scam, claiming to erase names from the Ashley Madison database in order to preserve users’ privacy, had sprung up in the few days since the hack.

“By clicking on these links, you are exposing your computer to adware, spyware, malware and viruses,” Evans said. “Multiple sites have now downloaded [the Ashley Madison user database] and are present. Nobody is going to be able to erase that information. There are confirmed cases of people trying to extort Ashley Madison clients.”

On 12 July, Evans told reporters, workers at the Toronto-based company logged into their computers and were greeted with “a threatening message” read over AC/DC’s Thunderstruck by hackers (or hacker) the Impact Team. The hack was made public on 20 July by the Impact Team alongside a note demanding Ashley Madison cease operation; on 20 August, Impact Team released all the information onto a deep-web site with a message that began “Time’s up!” Information from Ashley Madison’s sister site, Established Men, has not been released.

“When reporting these events to the police, Avid Life Media advised that the suspects had already made good on the threat by releasing the information on two Ashley Madison clients, one from Mississauga, Ontario, and the other from Brockton, Massachusetts, through the internet, which happened on July the 19th,” Evans said.

Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison, has offered a $500,000 Canadian dollar ($380,000 US) reward for information leading to the arrest of the hackers.

• In the US and Canada, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

