On Tuesday, hackers known as "The Impact Group" published a massive 10 gigabyte file containing personal information for over 30 million Ashley Madison users. Since the sensitive information was posted, journalists and researchers have been mining the data to determine who is using the go-to online dating site for cheating spouses. A ranking published this afternoon has identified the 25 cities worldwide with the most Ashley Madison accounts. San Antonio comes in at number 18.
According to a graph published by Dadaviz, the Alamo City is linked to 99,157 user accounts. When you just rank American cities identified on the graph, San Antonio comes in at number 7, besting Dallas, San Diego, Las Vegas and Philadelphia. The U.S. city with the most accounts was New York City, number two in the global ranking. New York has nearly 270,000 user accounts tied to payments to the Match.com for adulterers — not to be confused with Match.com, which has its fair share of adulterers.
The city with the most Ashley Madison accounts — nearly 375,000 — is São Paulo. Here's the full ranking.
Last month, KENS5 reported that San Antonio was number two in a ranking of U.S. cities with the most Ashley Madison members per capita, second only to Washington D.C. But that may not be the case. The report appears to be based on a list released by the site back in 2012.
But just because there are nearly 100,000 San Antonio accounts, it doesn't mean that there are nearly 100,000 straying spouses in the city who are going online in search of their sancha or sancho. It's unknown how many users may have multiple accounts or how many are still active. The accounts may also belong to users who no longer reside in San Antonio. Business Insider reported today that the data included over 15,000 U.S. government and military email addresses. Given the military's presence in San Antonio, one can presume a number of the military users are among the San Antonio accounts. Business Insider clarifies that the number of military and civilian employee users may not be so high, given Ashley Madison does not verify email accounts.
The personal information made public yesterday included account details and log-in information for 32 million Ashley Madison users, as well as credit card and payment transactions dating back to 2007. While users could falsify their account information, payment transactions revealed names, street address, email address, amount paid and a four-digit number that may be a parital credit card number or simply a transaction ID, according to Wired.
So is your spouse or partner stepping out on you? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? You can use this site to see if their email address is associated with an Ashley Madison account, but, again, the site does not verify email addresses. And as sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage advised today, sometimes not knowing is best.
