The parent company of Ashley Madison, Toronto-based Avid Life Media, is offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the hackers. The hack of the Ashley Madison site was first disclosed in July, with the attackers, who identified themselves as “The Impact Team”, threatening to dump the database, which is what occurred on August. 19.

Among the users whose information was exposed are U.S. government officials, civil servants in the United Kingdom and high-level executives at European and North America corporations, the report notes. While the names, along with other personal information, of these three clients were included in the published list of Ashley Madison users, there were no confirmations that the leak caused their suicide. There are fears email addresses and credit card information could fall into the wrong hands.

According to the lawsuit, Avid Life Media didn’t abide by the security and payment processing industry’s standards for holding user data.

Last week Avid Media was sued domestically in Canada in a class action lawsuit that seeks damages of more than $760 million.

The U.S. suits were filed in California, Texas and Missouri on behalf of eight clients that live in those three states as well as Georgia, Tennessee, Minnesota and Missouri. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this, and obviously piling on with ridicule and trying to out people is not gonna help the situation”.

Though he didn’t give any more information regarding the suicides, he did also mention that there were some hate crimes that might be connected to the hack as well but didn’t provide any further details.

Ashley Madison site owners claimed almost 40 million members last month, but Wired.com has reported that part of the hackers’ motiviation may have been that they considered the site, at best, misleading.

So do you consider the Ashley Madison hacks to be egregious violations of privacy, or a fitting outing of cheating husbands and wives? In addition, the hack is said to have resulted in two suicides, but that remains unconfirmed at this time.

Evans said Ashley Madison is cooperating with the investigation and police have found “no criminal wrongdoing” by the company, as was alleged by the hackers.