Originally Posted by EliteWebmaster

I honestly think the way AshleyMadison conducted it's business contributed to the hacker's motives. To say AM is shady is an accurate description. The data removal fee which is ridiculous in itself because they essentially held people's private info for ransom, probably drew the ire of the hacker group more when the hackers discovered all those data that was supposedly should have been deleted was still on the AM servers. What motives did AM have to keep storing data that people already paid $19.95 to have AM remove them. It should have been a simple delete and it would have saved AM tons of database/hard drive space to removed the said data. Yet they kept them for reasons unknown while collecting $19.95 from the member. It's just one of the things that is mind boggling and shady for them to do. It definitely didn't help their cause because once the hackers saw this, along with whatever else they were already peeved off at AM about, the "deleted data" still being stored by AM made the hackers even more determined to release the info to put AM in a more shady light in having to explain why they still had the data on their servers. And to this day, AM has not addressed why that data is still on their server.