Despite being hacked recently, hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for cheating website Ashley Madison in the last week, the platform’s parent company, Avid Life Media, announced in a statement released Monday.
“Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated,” Avid Life Media said in the statement.
The company said that the site’s day-to-day operations continue all the while it deals with the recent hack and the data theft of its private data by criminal hackers.
“Despite having our business and customers attacked, we are growing”, Avid Life Media said.
The statement added that “hundreds of thousands of new users”—including 87,596 women- signed up for the infidelity service during the last week.
It was on August 18 that hackers who claimed to be unhappy with Avid Life’s business practices breached the website and released details of more than 33 million Ashley Madison customers online. A second data dump contained thousands of emails and other company documents.
Since the hack and the publication of the stolen data, multiple sites have reported that there were very few femal members. According to Gizmodo, only 1,500 odd female members had ever checked the site for messages.
Avid Life in the Monday statement noted that an unnamed reporter had wrongly concluded that the number of active female members on Ashley Madison could be calculated based on assumptions about the meaning of fields contained in the leaked data.
The company said that women sent more than 2.8 million messages on the site in the last week alone, and that the ratio of paying male members to active female members is 1.2 to 1.
In related news, Avid Life Chief Executive Officer Noel Biderman stepped down from his post on Friday. The firm said the move was in its “best interests”.
