Just when I start to believe I’ve heard every possible trick unfaithful partners use to cover their tracks, modern technology finds another brutally efficient way to expose them.
Only last week, a friend rang me in tears after spending the weekend away with her sisters. While she was gone, her husband apparently forgot one crucial detail: their Ring doorbell camera sends a notification to both of their phones whenever someone comes to the front door. And that weekend, there was plenty of activity.
At around 2am, after what looked like a heavy night out, her husband and one of his friends staggered up to the entrance. The doorbell camera picked up their conversation as they debated who to call next. Roughly 20 minutes later, two escorts arrived.
The women stayed for about two hours before leaving, but not before a local drug dealer had also made an appearance with what appeared to be party supplies.
The Ring camera captured the entire ugly sequence in painful detail. For a divorce attorney, it was almost perfect evidence. For my friend, it was devastating.
It reminded me of something high-profile New York divorce lawyer James Sexton once told me: Apple, he joked, had practically paid for his vacation home because its devices are so remarkably effective at catching cheating spouses.
As Sexton put it with characteristic bluntness, a father could be upstairs in the bathroom sending explicit photos to his mistress while his child is downstairs using an iPad. Then the child looks up and asks, “Mommy, why are these pictures popping up?” Thanks to a shared iCloud account, the wife suddenly finds herself staring at intimate images her husband meant for someone else. Charming, indeed.
But compromising photos surfacing on the family iPad are only the first step into the digital minefield now waiting for anyone trying to cheat in the age of smart devices, cloud accounts and home security cameras.
Every time I think I have a handle on all the sneaky ways people cheat, technology invents a whole new way to catch them in the act
New York divorce lawyer James Sexton told me that Apple practically bought his holiday house because it’s so spectacularly good at catching cheating partners (stock image)
Sure, it has never been easier to start an affair. A slide into someone’s DMs, a disappearing message, a stealthy rendezvous. Cheaters might be convinced they have covered their tracks, but now they have to outsmart the smartphone.
When I put a call out to my friends and followers to share their own stories of catching a partner cheating via technology, it made for some wild reading.
One dear follower caught her husband via… the car speakers!
She was sitting beside him driving to dinner when his phone automatically connected to CarPlay. A message appeared across the dashboard from someone saved as ‘Mark from work,’ only for Siri to read it aloud in a distinctly female voice.
‘I can still smell you on my sheets.’
Turns out ‘Mark’ was ‘Marissa,’ a woman he had met on Tinder, discovered thanks to a court order on his phone. Double ouch.
Then there are the cheaters who forget about Uber. A woman who responded to my callout said her husband insisted he had spent Thursday evening at the pub with his mates. She opened their shared Uber account the following morning and discovered that he had been collected from his ex-girlfriend’s address at 6.43am.
When she looked a little further, she found the same address saved under recent Uber Eats deliveries – because who doesn’t crave a Big Mac after a… workout.
The television can be just as treacherous. A friend told me her family sat down to watch a movie when their Apple TV began cycling through photographs from a shared cloud account. There were the children at Christmas, their dog at the beach and, suddenly, her husband standing shirtless in a hotel bathroom beside a woman nobody in the room had ever seen before.
Why, for the love of God, do cheaters take photos? I’ll never understand it.
My friend is now divorced.
Smartwatches are another surprisingly effective little snitch. One follower said her partner came home from a work dinner and told her he had gone straight to bed at his hotel. Unfortunately for him, his health app had synced with their home computer and recorded thousands of steps after midnight, along with a rather enthusiastic burst of exercise at 1.17am.
He attempted to explain it away as a ‘late-night gym session.’ One quick phone call to the hotel and she confirmed that the gym closed at 10pm.
Fitness apps can be just as revealing. One woman became suspicious after her husband started going on unusually enthusiastic Saturday-morning runs. She opened his public Strava profile and noticed that every route ended up outside the same house in a suburb on the other side of town.
The house belonged to a female colleague.
Another follower discovered her husband’s affair because of one missing AirPod. He told her he had left it at the office, but when she opened the Find My app, the little white dot was sitting at an address she didn’t recognize.
After some digging, she discovered the house belonged to a woman he worked with. He tried to brush it off as ‘strategy meetings.’
I also discovered that while the modern cheater may remember to delete a hotel confirmation from their inbox, they might forget about digital calendar syncing.
One woman told me her husband booked a hotel room using the email address attached to their family account. The reservation automatically appeared on their shared calendar: ‘Harbor Suite – two guests – champagne package.’
He initially tried to claim it was for a work function. The ‘champagne package’ made that explanation rather difficult to sustain.
Loyalty programs are another spectacularly careless area. A follower received a cheerful notification congratulating her on the points earned during a recent two-night hotel stay. This was news to her because her husband had supposedly spent that weekend camping somewhere without phone reception.
She logged into the account and found the hotel booking and room-service charges. He had used their joint rewards membership because, apparently, saving a few dollars was worth attaching his full name and home address to the evidence.
Then there was the woman whose supermarket rewards account exposed an affair through a late-night purchase of condoms and cat food.
Cheaters might be convinced they have covered their tracks, but now they have to outsmart the smartphone
Fitness apps can be just as revealing. One woman became suspicious after her husband started going on unusually enthusiastic Saturday-morning runs
She and her husband didn’t own a cat. His mistress, she soon discovered, owned two.
Doorbell cameras don’t only capture the people entering your own house either. Word to the wise, your neighbors have them, too.
One follower said her partner dropped another woman home just before dawn, believing the dark apartment hallway gave them some privacy. Unfortunately, the neighbor across the corridor had installed a camera that caught him helping the woman find her keys before giving her a lengthy goodbye kiss.
The neighbor, a distant friend on Facebook, recognized him and sent the footage to his girlfriend.
Even complete strangers are now part of the surveillance network.
A woman told me her husband claimed he was away at a work conference when she spotted him in the background of a TikTok filmed at a restaurant in their own city. A group at the next table was recording a funny interaction that went viral, and over one woman’s shoulder, her husband could clearly be seen dining with someone who definitely wasn’t her.
He hadn’t been tagged, and nobody filming the video knew who he was. He simply had the spectacular bad luck to conduct his affair in a world where everybody now records everything.
That bad luck extends to social-media algorithms, too. One follower said the same woman kept appearing in her ‘People You May Know’ suggestions. She finally clicked on the profile and discovered that the stranger had recently uploaded photos from a weekend of shenanigans. One photo showed her boyfriend’s distinctive forearm tattoo.
When confronted, he admitted they had been seeing each other for months.
Then there is the overlooked trail left by digital receipts, like my friend who discovered a $38 parking charge outside a well-known brothel on an afternoon. Her partner claimed to be at work, which, for the record, is nowhere near the brothel. He tried to argue that the parking app had recorded the wrong location, apparently unaware that it also listed the exact time he entered and left.
This is what makes modern infidelity so dangerous for the incredibly stupid people attempting it. Once upon a time, a cheater only had to keep their story straight and make sure they didn’t come home with lipstick or perfume on their shirt. Oh, those were the days!
Now they have to get ahead of every device, shared account, iCloud connection and algorithm quietly recording their movements – and pray none of them sends their partner a helpful notification.
For today’s cheater, deleting a text from your phone is now about as useful as shutting the bedroom door while the rest of your house livestreams the evidence.
So, unless you’re a tech genius, I’d suggest you focus on the relationship you’ve committed to instead of playing away.
And on a personal note: Husbands, stay out of my damn DMs.
