Infidelity cheating in a marriage produces absolute chaos. Chaos in your home life, chaos in your work life, and chaos in your emotions. While you may suspect that your spouse is cheating, and while you may confront your spouse, generally the first response will be “you don’t trust me”, thus turning the tables on you. So, you start to think “am I crazy”? “maybe I’m wrong”. But the cell phone is out of reach, you are not permitted to review calls or emails received by your spouse, and when you ask to see the cell phone, again you are told that YOU have a problem, because you don’t trust your spouse. Also, the spouse’s computer is password protected, and you are not allowed to have the password. When you ask to have it, again you are told that you have a trust problem.
Decisions are made without advice of counsel, during this difficult time. You want to know. You just want the truth. Often these decisions to do anything possible to prove that your spouse is cheating, are illegal. You may decide that you want to install spyware on your husband’s computer. Your thought process may be “well, it is in the home…I own the home, too, we bought this computer with marital money…”, so you purchase software that advertising the ability to surreptitiously “pick up” and forward to you at another location, your spouse’s instant messages and emails. Further, it sends to you information related to any websites that your spouse is viewing. What the software is not going to tell you in its advertisement is that this would most probably violate Federal and State laws related to interception and disclosure of wire, oral or electronic communication…and you could be punished up to several years for this type of crime. Before you consider purchasing AND installing any kind of software on your spouse’s computer, please contact an attorney first.
So, still wanting to “prove” that your spouse is cheating, you consider the next step: your spouse has been receiving calls on his/her cell phone, and when the phone rings your spouse either steps outside or immediately hits the “ignore” button on the cell phone, stating that he/she will return the call later. You want to know what is going on with that cell phone, so you do a little research and determine that for $100 or less you can install spyware on the cell phone. This spyware will pick up and deliver to another location texts, emails AND give you GPS information. However, this is also most probably violating Federal and State laws. While you are determined to prove that your spouse is cheating, you don’t want to prove it to the point that you will be in more legal trouble than your spouse would be for the act you are trying to prove! Please contact an attorney before you consider installing cell phone spyware!
Ok, so here we go…..now YOU are the spouse who is cheating, and you are reading this and thinking…”Uh Oh!!” First (easy for me to say), stop cheating. If you are that unhappy in your relationship, see an attorney to terminate the marriage. If you believe that you have been spied upon (usually because your spouse, now, oddly seems to know EVERYTHING), bring your computer hard drive into a forensic expert and have it examined. This is NOT an inexpensive proposition, but you will have your answer, and in most cases you will have the location of where your information has been illegally forwarded from your computer. Now for your cell phone…never leave your phone unattended. To install spyware onto your cell phone, technology currently requires that your cell phone be in the spy’s hands for a short time. If your cell phone battery is running down much faster than usual, or your cell phone feels warm all the time, these are indications that you have spyware installed onto your phone.
And for both the cheating spouse and the “victim” spouse…both of you need to cancel your Facebook accounts. If you are heading to the litigation mode of a divorce, Facebook posts are generally not what you want to see as Exhibit “A”.