The Ashley Madison Hack: Couponers Are Cheaters, Too

In the weeks since the Ashley Madison hack, a number of specialty news sites have delved into the details of who in their niche was signed up on the affair-enabling website. Military news sites have tallied how many service members were registered. Religious news sites have speculated about how many clergymen were on there. Sports news sites have examined which sporting organizations are featured most prominently in the data.

So how about a coupon news site looks into how many couponers are cheaters?

Hackers, you’ll recall, recently stole and released email addresses, names, addresses and partial credit card numbers of more than 37 million people who had registered with Ashley Madison. The website promises to help find partners for would-be cheaters, using the tagline, “Life is short. Have an affair.”

Not everyone who provided an email address was a paying customer. And not everyone provided a real email address. But plenty of people did – including coupon users and industry professionals alike.

An examination of the data by Coupons in the News shows that among the registered email addresses are a handful associated with coupon-related companies like Valassis, the publisher of the RedPlum coupon inserts, and Inmar, the digital coupon provider and coupon processor. But most coupon professionals appear to be faithful – or at least they had the presence of mind not to sign up for the site using their work email account.

The same cannot be said for many who work for the manufacturers that provide our grocery coupons. There are 14 General Mills email addresses on the list, 18 from Kellogg, 26 from Georgia-Pacific and 35 from Kimberly-Clark. Nestle has 60 email addresses, Unilever has 89, and a whopping 177 Procter & Gamble email addresses are on the list.

Guess they all have more than just groceries on their minds, while they’re supposed to be working.

Couponing civilians are also well-represented. Nearly 300 people who signed up for the site, have some variation of the word “coupon” in their email address. There’s “couponboy”, “couponjohnson”, “coupondaddy” and the like. There’s the more suggestive “Sexycoupon”, “havesexwithcoupons” and “couponhoe”. There are a number of couponing “queens” and “divas”, which shows that not only men are signing up for the site.

In addition, the data dump contains email addresses like “Strictly4couponing” and “spamandcoupons”, which sound like secondary “couponing” email accounts dedicated to signing up for coupons and company emails (and, apparently, the occasional cheat-on-your-spouse website). And there are several email accounts associated with various online coupon code sites and even a couponing blog.

It’s important to note that Ashley Madison didn’t verify email addresses, so users could input a fake email or even someone else’s. The appearance of a particular email address on the list, then, is not proof that any particular person is an adulterer. Of course, on the list of paid accounts, one can cross reference email addresses with names, addresses, credit card information and even IP addresses to pinpoint specific users.

But we won’t.

For the sake of their spouses, one can only hope the couponers who signed up on the site never followed through and paid to have an affair. And if they did, for the sake of their finances and their reputation as a savvy shopper – one can only hope they used a coupon.

Image sources: Ashley Madison / rose3694