Cheating Website AshleyMadison.com Reportedly Made Nearly $2M/Year From Users Trying To Delete Accounts

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One of the reasons that hackers first attacked AshleyMadison.com, the dating site for people looking to cheat, is because it charges upwards of $20 to users for a “Full Delete” service that scrubs their accounts and photos from the site; something it could just do without charging. Just how many people paid for this? Enough for the website to make nearly $2 million a year.

This is according to BuzzFeed News, which cites a leaked internal document detailing the number of people who paid for the Full Delete.

The document says that in 2014, nearly 90,000 Ashley Madison users paid for the service, resulting in a total of $1.7 million in revenue for the company.

Unlike some dating sites, where closing your account means it’s deleted from the company’s servers, Ashley Madison and other sites merely hide your account from its search results. The Full Delete, which some view as an attempt to wring money out of married users who regret signing up, is supposed to completely erase all traces of your account.

Though, as BuzzFeed notes, it remains unclear whether these users’ credit card information is deleted, meaning they could still be exposed as part of this week’s massive data dump.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist