Love Rats, Watch Out: Soon You’ll Go The Way Of The Dodo ......
Love rats, watch out: soon you’ll go the way of the dodo
Keeping an affair secret in the digital age is increasingly difficult as bugs, texts and social media betray the guilty. How long before we can expect a Find My Cheating Spouse app.
Once it was so common that it was a business travel cliché. The banker away on a work trip arranges to see his mistress — who has meetings in the same town — at a five-star hotel. She sneaks into his room at night; by day they enjoy spa treatments, boat trips and dinners out together. They’re thousands of miles from home — who will be the wiser?
Last week Antonio Horta-Osorio, 52, a married father of three and boss of Lloyds bank, known in financial circles as “the Special One”, was alleged to have enjoyed just such an encounter with Wendy Piatt, the unmarried director-general of the Russell Group of universities. Piatt was reported to have been spotted entering and leaving Horta-Osorio’s Singapore hotel room using her own key, going on day trips and dining in fine restaurants with him.
It seems a disgruntled colleague told the press of Horta-Osorio’s alleged affair; but in the information age, when almost every action leaves a clunking digital footprint, it is only a matter of time before a cheating spouse is caught with his or her pants down.
The Lloyds bank boss Antonio Horta-Osorio with his wife, Ana
Today the Updike-ish affairs that were once a staple of suburban life have become as much victims of technology as Filofaxes and photo albums.
The broadcaster Joan Bakewell has bemoaned that her eight-year liaison with the playwright Harold Pinter in the 1960s, which inspired his play Betrayal, would no longer be possible. “We made our clandestine arrangements in snatched moments from our homes or public telephones. The play refers to ‘the pip, pip, pip phone calls’ made from a pub,” she wrote.
“There were no mobile phones, phone bills weren’t itemised, no ring-back facilities, no texting, no Twitter, no Facebook — all of which can ambush today’s lovers. Our plans left no trace.”
Last week it was alleged Horta-Osorio had been having an affair with Wendy Piatt
He says it’s impossible now even to lie about details: “You can’t say it’s only a few times, when credit card and phone records will record absolutely every meeting. Many of my clients are found out because they share an Oyster travel card, which lists everywhere they’ve been, with their partner. Others are found out by their children, who’ve been playing with their phones.”
“The days of a discreetly louche dinner à deux with your lover at the unfashionable end of town are over,” confirms Ayesha Vardag, divorce lawyer to the super-rich. “There will almost certainly be someone photographing their food, their friends and the general ambience for TripAdvisor, Facebook, Instagram and the like, so there’s a real chance you’ll be caught in the crossfire and your lies exposed.”
Last year the identities of 30m wannabe cheaters who had signed up to the Ashley Madison infidelity website were plastered across the internet by hackers. They had it coming, but even the most innocuous gadgets conceal pitfalls. One US Iraq War veteran uncovered his wife’s own secret manoeuvres when their Wii console revealed she had been enjoying virtual bowling sessions, as a preamble to other activities, with another user.
We nobbled someone at Ascot when they were supposed to be elsewhere, caught be chance on someone else’s Facebook post
Organising a tryst now involves more planning than General Montgomery did on the eve of El Alamein. Lucy, 56, a podiatrist from Hertfordshire with an adult son, has had three affairs over the past 15 years. She has a second secret phone, which can be accessed only by a Pin code and is set on silent mode. She checks it at the same time every day before hiding it — separately from the Sim card — in her Christmas present drawer. Should her husband find it, she’ll say it’s a present for their cleaner.
“You can’t be too careful. One man I used to see was discovered by his wife because he got a speeding ticket from Oxfordshire, where we were meeting, rather than Birmingham, where he said he was,” Lucy says.
“Another linked his mobile to his sat nav when he was driving his family to his mother’s. A text came through and the sat nav boomed, ‘Hi, sexy’. He managed to divert them and got away with it but he almost crashed the car.”
Even the briefest encounters are fraught with complications. The one-night stand, beloved of travelling salesmen and Erica Jong, becomes far less appealing when the next morning your lover can check your marital status on Facebook and wreak cyber-revenge by naming you on one of the dozens of websites devoted to shaming bounders.
According to Marshall, these days most affairs are busted before they even start. A colleague’s overfamiliar remark on Twitter can lead to weeks in the spare room if spotted by a sensitive spouse. An innocent Facebook search for an ex will be logged in your history — and who will believe your explanation that you just wanted to laugh at their weight gain?
Vardag warns that cheaper and more sophisticated technology is turning us all into private investigators: “We no longer have to rely on chance sightings on social media, there are already advanced facial recognition technologies which allow you to do big sweeps of the internet to pick up your errant spouse carousing in Cabo or snogging in Solihull.”
For every app such as Tinder making philandering easier, there are five developed to catch you out. For just a few pounds anyone can buy gizmos that read Sim cards. A host of invisible (although probably illegal) bugging apps are often free and can be installed on a loved one’s phone allowing you to eavesdrop on their calls remotely, scan their social media and read their texts. The truly paranoid can even install tiny wireless cameras around the house that relay live footage of your partner to your mobile.
When couples do split up, social media is increasingly to blame. A survey revealed that one-third of divorce cases now cite Facebook evidence to confirm infidelities and reveal hidden assets.
“[Facebook] is like having a massive public noticeboard,” says Lyn Ayrton of the Leeds law firm Lake Legal. “Someone said she was not in a relationship with anybody new but then posted a message inviting everybody to a housewarming party for her and her boyfriend.”
“We’ve nobbled someone at Ascot when they were supposed to be somewhere else, caught by chance on someone else’s Facebook post, making them well and truly busted,” says Vardag, warning that soon the love rat may have gone the way of the dodo.
“The advent of DNA testing allowed murderers to be caught years after their crimes, so you can expect in a few years a Find My Cheating Spouse app to trawl the past decade for every time the spouse has been caught in the corner of a stranger’s shot whispering sweet nothings into the wrong person’s ear.”
Happily, I have neither the time nor the inclination for an affair and just as well, as I realised last week when my husband linked his new phone to the family iCloud — something he’d previously avoided. Within seconds all his contacts were on his phone, but so were all my texts. “Hi Julia,” he started reading, to my horror. “Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at . . . ”
Since this, like almost all my communications, involved my children’s play dates, no harm was done. But it made me wonder why my husband had been so reluctant to use iCloud. What could he be hiding? Perhaps it’s time to switch on his phone’s GPS function. Or if I put his Oyster card number in the Transport for London website, I can see exactly where he’s really been.
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