Catching A CyberCheat

He’s a husband who got busted by his wife for going to online porn sites. Now he writes to offer more tips on how to catch a cybercheater.

Hi Pat,

As a man who has been caught this way myself, I was very interested in your article on “Snooping To Catch A Cybercheat.”

In my case it was pornography (using pay sites) rather than adultery but the principle is the same. Partly to make amends for my misdeeds, I’d like to make a few suggestions for extra content.

The article is very good but you missed a few tricks:

  1. You talk about how to check the History files but I believe there is a simpler method. If you select View from the top menu and then click on Explorer Bar/History the list of websites visited will appear in the left hand navigation pane.
  2. If you have the Google toolbar installed you can use it to check previous searches. When you start to enter a search term Google will guess the words you want based on previous searches, eg if you searched previously for “coconuts” and then type “co” the word “coconuts” will appear in a list.  By the same token, if you type in the letters “st” and the word “strip club” appears in the list you know your husband has been searching for strip clubs.
  3. A number of popular mainstream websites can be used as a gateway to illicit content and people who use them this way sometimes leave traces. For example:
    a. If someone creates an account in You Tube  they can access adult content. Each time they sign in, YouTube will greet them with their user name. So if a user name appears when you go into YouTube that means your husband has an account. Even better, you can click on the user name to check the account holder’s favourite videos, viewing history (current day only) and e-communications with other members
    b. In ebay, the search box has a similar facility to Google, ie it guesses search terms based on your previous searches, with the same implications
    c. Amazon has a facility to suggest products for you based on previous searches, so if a lot of porn titles appear you can draw the obvious conclusion.

Admittedly there are ways the suspect can avoid all these methods of detection, eg if he clears his search history or logs out each time he finishes a YouTube session.  But the more bad things he does online the more likely he is to make a slip-up.

Other thoughts:

If you find your husband has visited a pay site, note the amount they charge and the date visited, and see if you can find it in his credit card statements.

Make an HTML and/or paper copy of the relevant homepages – that way if he gets suspicious it will be too late for him to destroy the evidence

Give him a chance to confess (or to put it another way, trap him into telling a lie) by asking him a general question about what he’s been doing on the web lately. If he tries to pretend that he’s only been reading the sports news (and he will) that’s the time to go ballistic and hit him with the evidence.

I hope this all helps – more power to women on the trail of cheating husbands!

David