Ashley Madison $3 Million Lawsuit: Amazon, GoDaddy Sued By 3 Ashley Madison Users Due To Search Engine Hosting

The Ashley Madison hacking updates continue with the recent news about lawsuits coming to the forefront. One Chicago-area man sued Ashley Madison because the 40-year-old believes there were fake female accounts on the site, and he wants to keep using it with his data protected.

However, the newest lawsuit against Ashley Madison, according to Law360, comes from three ex-Ashley Madison users who are going up against Amazon and GoDaddy for their role in hosting the Ashley Madison leaked data search engines. The search engines that make it easy for folks to look up Ashley Madison data will not be named in this article — however, the Ashley Madison search engines are still live as of this writing.

One of the Ashley Madison search engines claims they keep no Ashley Madison data — another says they don’t store the email addresses that are searched for via the site. One, with a website registration date of July 27, lists GoDaddy.com as the registrar URL. Another of the three websites mentioned in the lawsuits lists “Reseller: Amazon” in their Whois website data.

The three website owners are listed, along with Amazon Web Services Inc. and GoDaddy.com LLC, in the lawsuit. All three are Arizona-based webmasters, according to Law360, and they are being blamed for helping the Ashley Madison hacked data remain public.

One of the Ashley Madison websites, registered on August 26, and registered with GoDaddy, even has a special discreet section for members of the media to contact them to obtain more data about the Ashley Madison users. Another boasts that their Ashley Madison search engine has more than 37 million records in the database. Since one of the search engines contains “Ashley Madison” as part of the domain name, it’s quite surprising that Avid Life Media, Inc., hasn’t already gone after them for copyright infringement.

Either way, it was last Thursday when the three “John Roes” from California, New Jersey and Maryland went after all the websites legally, claiming that possessing the stolen Ashley Madison data means they have stolen property. The three men had their Ashley Madison accounts since 2008 — and gave their names and credit card info to Ashley Madison.

The former Ashley Madison users don’t think it’s fair that users are being charged $4.99 to $149.99 to access the hacked data that’s hosted by Amazon Web Services and GoDaddy.com. And they especially don’t like that Amazon nor GoDaddy has responded to their letter to take the sites down, reads the lawsuit.

The websites, in their own defense, claim they aren’t actually hosting the data — but are only making the hacked Ashley Madison data searchable. The lawsuits also claim the Ashley Madison search sites are causing emotional distress.

[Image via Ashley Madison]