SHELBY COUNTY, Tenn. — WREG discovered city and county employees used the domain’s linked to government agencies in order to sign up for Ashley Madison, a site that encourages married people to cheat on their spouses.
Now, some are taking action while other leaders are ignoring the issue altogether.
Mayor A C Wharton’s Office refused to talk about the Ashley Madison hack on camera.
They said since Ashley Madison does not authenticate emails, those accounts could have been used by anyone.
However, plenty of people think it is still reason to investigate.
After the site was hacked, WREG uncovered seven Memphis city emails accounts, one Shelby County email account and one Germantown email account were used to sign up.
Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell was disturbed by the news.
“It’s a concern that you have websites like that, but certainly it’s a concern to us if we have staff who are using it and they’re using it on county time,” he said.
When we reached out to Mayor Wharton’s Office, we received this statement:
“More than 6,000 people have City email. The seven UNAUTHENTICATED addresses you reference represents less than .0000000000001 percent of all City employees. There is no credible, viable evidence of abuse that would warrant an investigation at this time.”
Councilman Myron Lowery said the city could investigate if it wanted to, but he does not see the point.
“They couldn’t trace it back to any one individual and the company doesn’t have any first names or last names tied to those email addresses,” he said.
County Mayor Mark Luttrell viewed the situation differently.
“We have started an investigation into it,” he told WREG. “Nothing conclusive at this point, but we’re doing some investigation into it. Obliviously, it would be a misuse of government property.”
Both the city and county told WREG their email domains should only be used for business.
The county only had one possible violation, but Mayor Luttrell said that’s still one too many.
“If you let one employee abuse and get away with it, there will be others that will try it. So we have to be rather high profile when we discover these types of violations,” said Luttrell.
WREG has requested copies of any city emails containing both the words “Ashley” and “Madison”.
We will let you know when the city responds to that request.