Legal Issues With Spying On Your Cheating Spouse

When someone suspects their spouse of cheating there are usually a few stages they go through. There will be doubt, there will be anger and there will be a lot of tension surrounding both. When the possible reality has sunk in, the person almost always wants to get to the bottom of things and learn the absolute truth. To do that they can employ a lot of sneaky techniques and, essentially, spy on their spouse’s actions.

The problem with this is that there are a lot of risks involved in spying on a spouse. Legally speaking, it’s a very dangerous thing to get involved with because you could easily cross a legal line without knowing it. At that point the information you learn will help you know the truth, but it won’t win you any favours should a divorce come about. In all reality, spying through illegal methods can actually land you in jail, or possibly just fined.

Defining what laws apply to investigating your cheating spouse is tricky. For one thing, laws differ greatly from state to state and from country to country. In some places limit the possible actions you can take with a great number of detailed privacy laws. You could always investigate those laws before getting too heavily involved in any spying actions, but laws can be very difficult to interpret without any expertise. Even then, if the circumstances are right there is a chance that other laws might be applied, just to get around any loopholes you may have found.

One of the things that gets people into a lot of trouble is assuming that the legal availability of certain tools means using those tools is legal as well. Spy shops offer all kinds of ways to snoop on a spouse but you need to be aware of all the fine print disclaimers that are attached to their products as well as their store itself. It’s incredibly easy to use spy equipment in such a way that you are breaking privacy laws.

Then, once people get going they tend to get carried away. One piece of information leads them to the next until they find themselves following a whole trail of clues that they can’t help but continue with. Sometimes that leads the snoop to a roadblock where they have to somehow obtain information from a phone company or an internet service, and to do this they basically end up lying. Doing that is considered obtaining information under false pretenses and can land you in a lot of legal trouble almost anywhere you go.

Even hiring an investigator isn’t foolproof. A lot of laws will consider their actions your actions just because you are the one that hard them. That means if the investigator were to break the law you can get in just as much trouble as they can.

This doesn’t mean you can’t catch a cheating spouse. It just means you should be careful about how you go about it, and actually spying is not the best way to go. So before you take the matter into your own hands, you must seek legal advice.