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Ashley Madison review
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Good for: Married men and women who want the best-known affair site and will pay per conversation.
Skip it if: You can't afford for your account to surface again: it is the site whose 2015 breach became the cautionary tale.
Visit Ashley Madison
Ashley Madison is the name everyone knows, and for that reason it's also the site most people are wary of. In 2015 hackers stole and published data on 36 million accounts, including people who had paid $19 for a "Full Delete" that, the FTC found, didn't delete them. Extortion emails followed within days. The FTC's complaint also said the site had created tens of thousands of fake "engager" profiles of women to get men to pay. The full story of the engager profiles is in our fake-profiles guide.
That was a decade ago, under the old owner's management, and the settlement required a security program and independent audits. But it's a reminder that "discreet" is a marketing word. Women use it free; men buy credits to start conversations, which gets expensive if you message widely.
Use it, if you do, with a new email address, a unique password, photos that don't show your face or home, and a payment method you'd be comfortable seeing on a statement. Our affair-site privacy guide walks through each step, and infidelity and the law covers what an exposed account can mean in a divorce.
The facts
- Cost
- Free for women. Men pay per conversation with credits; reported packs are 100 credits for $59, 500 for $169 and 1,000 for $289.[1]
- Who uses it
- We found no current, audited user numbers. (Our own check: no published source found.)
- Verification & safety tools
- We found no published photo- or ID-verification system. Video-chat before you meet. (Our own check: no published source found.)
- Privacy record
- Hackers stole and published account and profile data on 36M users in 2015. The FTC found users who paid $19 for "Full Delete" had data kept anyway. If discretion is the point, assume anything you upload could one day be public.[2]