The net closes in on unfaithful partners

Apr 30 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch investigates the world-wide web of deceit and learns about one woman’s crusade to beat it

JO SCHUMACHER tapped on the keys, holding her breath. Maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe not. There’s an old saying about people who listen at doors, even virtual ones. And when Jo clicked to open her boyfriend’s emails, she was to discover the truth of it.

“One of the emails was from his friend,” she says. “He was congratulating him for seeing me and another girl of only 21.

“It blew me away. I thought, ‘My God, who else has this man been sleeping with?’”

Jo had been surprised and delighted by the salesman’s eagerness to settle down after they met via a dating website.

“He completely charmed me,” she says. “He was very erudite, and could quote from a huge variety of books, even medical encyclopedias. We met after two weeks of talking online. He showered me with gifts, took me out to dinner – the attention was fantastic. By three months, he wanted to commit and move in together.”

The couple split up and Jo threw herself into the management of her beauty spa. Previously, she had been a police officer in the Merseyside force and the instincts honed during those four years hadn’t completely left her.

How many more men were out there, she wondered, professing love to their partner by day, and advertising themselves on dating websites when he or she had gone to bed?

Spurred on by colleagues, she chatted to 100 men online, and met about 30 of them, asking them if they actually had a partner. The result shocked even her. Of the total, 85% admitted they were attached.

She managed to build up a profile of the online cheat.

“The typical age was 30 to 45, traditionally married for five to eight years with two children between two and 10 and a wife who works in the public sector – a government agency or nursing – where she might have to go to work early and go to bed early,” she says. “He’s high calibre, working in business rather than construction. You’d look at him and think he had a perfect life, but he wants excitement which he perceives as being available via the internet.

“I realised it was a huge issue, both for people using the internet who genuinely want to meet someone, and people who thought they were in trusting relationships.”

Cheshire private detective John Camm estimates that at least 10% of the partners suspected of cheating that he is asked to follow are having affairs that started on the internet.

A social psychology study in 2000 predicted that infidelity would escalate as online forums for meeting people, like chat rooms, social networking sites and dating websites, flourished.

Jo says she realised that the fear a partner was cheating online was a common source of anxiety.

In response, she set up nethim.com, where she scours the top dating websites for errant partners. She asked clients to provide identification information like date of birth, football team and physical attributes so she could track them down, then approach them with a fictitious online persona.

“Traditionally, they call themselves by their nickname, children’s names or after their football team.

“There are hundreds of Evertonlad64s, Big Blues, Little Blues out there. I’ll initiate conversation and ask for a picture.”

As soon as the service was publicised, she was inundated with 500 people from as far afield as Australia and Canada queuing up for searches.

The demand was such that Jo began looking into the possibility of developing a software package that would help in her crusade to flush out the cheats.

Her idea was for software that made use of controversial “keylogger” technology and takes screenshots of the sites that are being looked at, files downloaded, email and instant messaging records, webcam activity and an email sent straight to you in response to key words, like sex or dating.

A bid for investment on Dragon’s Den hit the skids when producers decided it was “unethical”.

But Jo was so convinced that she saved up the £20,000 she needed.

“I lived on toast and mayonnaise for a year and nothing got fixed,” she says. “Every penny went into development of the software.” Her spy software, catchline Detect, Protect, Preserve, Respect, goes on the market next week, to be followed by packages to monitor your children’s online activity. It can only legally be used on a shared computer.

You can get reports as often as you like to your computer anywhere, including internet cafes on holiday, she explains, describing it as like a “video” on your computer.

According to Marianne Quick, a lecturer in psychology at Edge Hill University, who wrote her PhD on infidelity and the internet, open communication could prove a more effective safeguard against actual infidelity.

“Research is still ongoing into how many relationships started on the internet actually develop into real affairs,” she says.

“But, when questioned, both men and women said they would be more likely to start a real affair if their connection online is emotional. Real communication is what keeps a relationship alive.

“If it was my partner, I would not want to set up spy software, I’d want a discussion first.”

Jo sees the software as a defence against immorality in a vast virtual world where even governments can’t impose rules, and robustly deflects any accusation that her service feeds on paranoia.

“I’m promoting fidelity,” she argues. “If your partner flirted with another girl in front of you, you would intervene and say this is unacceptable and stop him from doing it.

“But, if you are going to flirt and cheat, people are more likely to do it online than in work or in a club.

“Nethim is a deterrent, and if it was me I’d be fine about it being put on my PC.”

But you have to ask yourself if you’re ready for what you might learn.

“I don’t think people are paranoid enough. I wasn’t,” she admits. “But women have a very good instinct for if a partner is cheating. If he can’t wait to get onto the computer when you’ve gone to bed, or he’s got a webcam but hasn’t got relatives in Australia, you have to ask yourself why he’s got it.”

FURTHER details are available at www.nethim.com

emma.pinch

I was bored but the grass definitely isn’t greener

A STUDY last year showed that 72% of respondents knew at least one person who had engaged in a sexual cyber affair.

Property developer Alex Mullen, 34, from Hoylake (name has been changed), is one of them. He was soon spending four hours a day on adult dating websites after logging on when the relationship with his live-in girlfriend, Angie, hit a stale patch.

“I was bored at home,” he admits. “Sex wasn’t that good at the time and we weren’t really getting on. I was looking for some sort of excitement and something which might have led to a relationship.”

He logged on to adultfriendfinder.com, and was soon receiving messages from women.

“I’d get into work, get my work stuff sorted, then get on the website to see who had winked at me or whatever,” he says.

“It got to the point where I was logging on all the time. I became addicted to it, to seeing what was out there. I’d wake up in the morning and wonder if there were any messages for me. I’d spend three or four hours a day on it at work, trawling through the site. It was bizarre. At home, I couldn’t wait until she went to bed so I could get on the computer.”

He secretly arranged to meet four or five of them after weeks of chatting, but found the grass was not always greener.

His girlfriend suspected he was up to no good and packed her bags.

“Now, when I think of being in a hotel lobby chatting to these girls, I think I must have been up the wall,” he groans. “They didn’t turn out to be anything like their profiles. Angie is a stunning, beautiful girl, and I’d been begging her for months to move in with me. The irony is, that if I’d seen a picture of her on the website, I’d have sent her 100 emails. I suppose it’s the possibilities of the unknown.

“I didn’t realise until she left that I had someone attractive, very loving and very warm already at home. I’m now trying to piece back together my relationship with her and I’ve banned myself from the internet. It’s part of my rehab. What’s out there can be very, very destructive.”