MORE THAN 400 would-be adulterers in Enniskillen have signed up to use a website that aims to facilitate extra-marital affairs, startling figures published by The Times have revealed.

But perhaps more surprisingly, according to these statistics, the small county Tyrone village of Dromore, close to the Fermanagh border, has a total of 167 users of the Ashley Madison so-called ‘infidelity’ website.

With the latest information from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) showing that the Dromore electoral ward has a total population of 2,370, this figure represents seven per cent of residents in the village.

Launched in 2001, Ashley Madison claims to have over 40 million anonymous members worldwide and has the slogan, “Life is short. Have an affair”. Its website has a section dedicated to ‘Infidelity News’.

An online dating service based in Canada that is marketed to people who are married or in a committed relationship, it hit the headlines around the world earlier this summer when it emerged that details of more than 33 million accounts had been stolen from the website.

As well as dealing with the data theft, the company that owns the website has also furiously denied recent claims that the vast majority of its female profiles are fake.

Meanwhile, The Times has revealed that there are over 1.3 million British profiles contained on the leaked database. It has published details of the towns and cities from across the UK with over 100 registered users.

According to the figures contained in The Times, Enniskillen has 460 registered users of the Ashley Madison website, while, in Tyrone, Omagh has 545 users along with Dromore’s 167.

By comparison, Belfast – the largest city in Northern Ireland – has a total of 8,520 registered users.

Billing itself as the world’s leading married dating service for ‘discreet’ encounters, Ashley Madison has stated that it is “actively adjusting to the attack on our business and members’ privacy by criminals”.

A group of hackers calling themselves ‘The Impact Team’ has claimed responsibility for the theft of Ashley Madison’s customer data, which was originally reported by a variety of media outlets in July.

They also threatened to reveal the data unless the Ashley Madison website was taken down.

Several weeks ago, the BBC reported that this stolen customer data had been leaked on the so-called ‘dark web’, meaning it is accessible only via encrypted browsers. The material allegedly posted included members accounts and credit card details.