Turning against Ashley Madison: Hong Kong's digital cheat-buster probes growing trend of spousal affairs
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 21 November, 2015, 4:30pm
UPDATED : Saturday, 21 November, 2015, 5:50pm
Lana Lam
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Ashley Madison has encouraged the proliferation of affairs. Photo: Reuters
Cheating on your partner has never been easier thanks to smartphones and dating apps like Tinder, prompting a pair of brothers to start a “digital detective” service in Hong Kong aimed at rooting out cheaters by spying on their online profiles.
But while social media platforms have made it easier to have an affair, they are also an adulterer’s Achilles heel, especially after hackers targeted extramarital affairs site Ashley Madison earlier this year and leaked details of its users.
“People can take advantage of social media and for guys or girls, some people actually go hunting, especially on a business trip in a city where the partner is miles away,” said Yosh Wong, director of Emmaus, an investigation firm formed in 2004 which specialises in corporate cases but also handles suspected infidelity.
“It’s hard to identify a trend because there are no statistics to show it,” he said, adding that anecdotally, there had been more cases of suspected infidelity in recent years.
“It’s also difficult to pinpoint because in Chinese culture, people want to keep it within the family but over the years, we know there are people investigating their partners.”
Wong said dating apps and instant messaging like WhatsApp and WeChat allow people to find someone who is physically nearby and immediately start a conversation.
“It makes it easier for people to cheat. In the past, they might go to a red light district and we could follow them at night. Nowadays, they go online and the lady might just go up to the hotel room and it’s harder to catch them.”
It is exactly these online platforms that are the focus of a new service called Countercheat, which launched earlier this month.
The service offers three types of products for prices ranging from HK$2,000 to HK$10,000, which all focus on rummaging through a suspected cheater’s dirty digital laundry such as tracking them on Tinder or finding deleted messages on smartphones.
“We can teach you how to fish or we can fish for you,” said Hong Kong resident Liam Keating, 49, who started the service with his brother Seamus, 37, who is based in Austria.
Two potential clients, both women, are in negotiations to use the service, Keating said yesterday.
Daniel Lee, from a firm called Hong Kong Private Investigator that started three years ago, said there had been a “noticeable increase” in adultery cases.
This year, his company handled about 300 infidelity cases, up from about 200 last year and just under 200 in 2013.
Most of the clients are male, Lee said, with husbands fearing their wives are cheating. “Many of our customers are expats but their partners are local,” he said. “Usually, our client is an expat gentleman married to a local female but they find out that the wife is having an affair, often a few years after they have been married.”
Lee said it was mainly “human nature” as to why they have more male clients. “If a wife finds out, they usually confront their husband, but for men, they will often collect evidence and even go to a lawyer first before they confront their wife which is why they come to us.”
Technology has also made it easier for housewives to find other partners, he said. “Husbands and men are usually opportunistic so if there’s a chance, they will go for it but for women, they may actually find a better partner so they engage in a longer relationship, but these can be quite damaging to a marriage.”
In Hong Kong, there are about 20 companies that offer private investigation services, catering to either English or Chinese-speaking clients.
Infidelity investigations can involve physical surveillance of a target and cases mainly involve a partner seeking confirmation that their other half is cheating, with results often used during divorce negotiations or in marriage counselling.
The trend of online apps being used to cheat on partners comes as a new survey found that people in Hong Kong spend more than two hours a day on their smartphones.
Government figures released in January also showed that divorce rates had jumped almost fourfold from 6,295 in 1991 to 22,271 in 2013. The number of people remarrying for a third or fourth time has also skyrocketed in recent years.
