Ashley Madison owner Avid Life Media (ALM) was running an online escort service, according to a report published this week.
The extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison – whose tagline is ‘Life is short. Have an affair’ – made headlines after it was recently hacked, with millions of users’ personal data published.
The Daily Dot, citing leaked documents, reported Wednesday that an internal memo indicates ‘legal entities’ for Avid Life Media, one of which is shell company Pernimus Limited.
Pernimus Limited leased escorts.ca in 2013, the The Daily Dot reported.
Escorts.ca was under a ’10-year lease for use by Ashley Madison,’ the news outlet quoted a March 2013 leaked document as saying.
Escorts.ca was suspended Tuesday night, according to The Daily Dot. However, the website appeared to be back up on Saturday evening.
The Daily Dot wrote: ‘The document shows that ALM’s intention for the site, which did not charge users to browse its pages, was to funnel traffic to Ashley Madison and other ALM properties.’
According to The Daily Dot, escorts were also being recruited for the ‘sugar daddies’ website Arrangement Finders by ALM executives.
That website’s tagline is ‘Intimacy with a Twi$t’ and appears on its homepage.
‘Tested out sending emails to 20 escorts,’ The Daily Dot’s report quoted an email from ALM worker John Santoro sent in June 2012 to ALM’s CEO at the time, Noel Biderman, as saying.
It purportedly continued: ‘Along the lines of “you look amazing. I’m traveling on business. Are you on AF [Arrangement Finders]? I use that service when I travel for similar encounters.”‘
Santoro allegedly wrote in the email: ‘I got back 5 replies. I’m getting Eros.com scraped for escorts (India). Now, we have a list [of] real indy escorts that could hear about AF on a constant basis. … We might be able to do this semi-legit.’
‘Smart,’ Biderman wrote back, according to The Daily Dot.
According to the news outlet, ALM marketing manager Binu Koshy wrote of anti-human trafficking website NeverForSale.com in an email from August 2013: ‘Who are these guys and why would they spend so much time and resources going after us…haha.’
Per The Daily Dot, Santoro wrote back ‘Perhaps we should start targeting cities with the largest human traffic organizations.’ Biderman was reportedly one of several people on the email thread.
