Some people couldn’t tell a lie to save their lives. Others keep romantic relationships on the side without their spouses or partners ever finding out. If you suspect that your better half has another half you’re not aware of, you might want to consider finding out whether your suspicions of infidelity are true. One of the first things you can do to investigate the situation is take a look at the apps installed on your partner’s phone.
Just like technology can reveal the activities of a cheating spouse, it can also help conceal them. Here are the most common apps used for infidelity.
9 Cheating Apps That Your Partner May Be Using
Serial cheaters are always on the hunt for someone new, and they calculate their activities carefully so the different people they’re involved with never find out about each other. So what apps do cheaters use?
There are more than you might think. If you suspect your partner is cheating, dating apps can be a red flag, but you shouldn’t overlook less-obvious examples. Any messaging app can be used to manage an ongoing affair or a quick hookup, though serial (and serious) cheaters favor those with advanced privacy features.
1. Viber
Viber is a messaging app with some cloak-and-dagger features like Disappearing Messages that delete themselves after a few minutes. Cheaters can use Viber to send intimate images, videos and messages without a record of their incriminating behavior. Viber’s Hidden Chats stay invisible until a PIN is entered that causes them to appear in the chat list.
2. Signal
Like Viber, Signal features automatically disappearing messages that are deleted after a set amount of time. Signal’s use of end-to-end encryption means that only the intended recipient is able to decrypt the message—no one else, not even the app’s maker. Touted by public figures like whistleblower Edward Snowden and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Signal recently saw a huge boom in sign-ups after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted his approval for the secure messaging app.
3. Telegram
Telegram is a popular messaging app in its own right, making it a less-obvious tool used by cheaters. Just like Signal and Viber, the latest version of Telegram has an auto-destruct feature for messages as well as secret chats that are visible only after a PIN is entered.
4. WhatsApp
Your significant other might be using the popular chat app WhatsApp to communicate with a secret love partner. This app doesn’t feature secret conversations, but a cheating partner could manually delete incriminating text conversations from the chat history so you’re less likely to find out about them.
5. Facebook Messenger
Facebook Messenger is another seemingly innocuous chat app that your partner could be using for a secret relationship. Facebook cheating is hard to detect because the app itself is innocuous (however little used, who doesn’t have Facebook?). Still, it’s easy enough to connect and flirt with old coworkers, classmates and exes via Facebook Messenger. A lot of people consider digital flirting to be harmless and fair game in a relationship. Where do you stand on this issue? Are you and your partner clear about it?
6. Instagram
Like Facebook, Instagram is a pretty innocuous app that a lot of people have, which means it’s relatively difficult to know if your partner is using it for illicit communication. The Instagram direct-message feature provides the same easy communication channel as Facebook’s Messenger, and lends itself equally well to flirting or more direct arrangements.
7. Snapchat
Snapchat falls into a gray area between regular social media apps and those “red flag” secure-communications apps like Signal. The original point of Snapchat was to enable often-racy, short-lived communications which would then self-destruct; so Snapchat cheating is just a question of using those default abilities the way they were intended.
8. Tinder, Grindr, Bumble and Other Dating Apps
It should go without saying that if your committed partner has Tinder, Grindr, Bumble or some other dating app installed on their smartphone, you’re in serious trouble. Each dating app has its own focus, from finding “the one” to finding a quick hookup, but none of those things bodes well when you’re already in a relationship.
Do yourself a favor and learn the names of the most popular dating apps. If you see one of them installed on a partner’s phone, it’s time to start asking questions. It’s possible those are just leftovers from before your relationship, depending how long you’ve been together (“Yeah? Let’s go through them and check your recent activity, shall we?”), but some, like the Ashley Madison app, are explicitly marketed as cheating aids.
If you actually met on the app in question, you might give the benefit of the doubt, but otherwise this is one of the biggest and reddest of flags.
9. SeekingArrangement
Like Ashley Madison, the SeekingArrangement app doesn’t really have an innocent explanation. The whole point of the app is to enable “arrangements” between beautiful young women and men affluent enough to pay for their companionship (and yes, that’s a euphemism).
If you’re in a long-term relationship with joint financial goals and shared accounts, it’s an “adding insult to injury” kind of scenario: not only is he cheating, he’s taking money from your household to do it.
How to Find Out If Your Partner Is Cheating
It’s important to remember that just knowing which apps cheaters use is only part of the picture. Many of these apps have legitimate uses aside from infidelity, so their presence on your partner’s phone might not necessarily be a smoking gun. A cheater will always have a plausible excuse for installing them —- “I have to use it to communicate with the office,” or “I need it to stay in touch with a friend who doesn’t use WhatsApp or Facebook” — which is plausible because many noncheaters would say the same thing.
This could be the truth, but if your instincts say otherwise, be on alert. There are some fairly well-established behavioral signals that betray a cheater and can tell you whether your feelings are justified. If you think extra vigilance is required but you haven’t spotted any common cheating apps on your partner’s phone, check whether those apps are hidden. The app itself may have an innocent explanation, but hiding it shows a guilty conscience.
Spokeo Can Help You Expose a Cheating Partner’s Activities
Spokeo is an internet-based people search tool that uses over 12 billion records to reveal interesting truths — such as social media accounts or dating profiles — about the people in your life. Whether it’s a potentially cheating spouse, a new friend or a business contact, you might want to run a Spokeo search by entering their name on our website.
Let’s hope your suspicions are wrong. But if the person has a criminal record (additional fees may apply for a criminal search) or a checkered past they don’t want you to know about, you might find out about it with our easy-to-use search engine.