A new type of investigation has emerged in recent years called “social media investigations,” and they are quickly becoming a necessity in cheating spouse cases. This is because social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide a treasure trove of information about the person’s life! They can be used to find out about their relationships, habits, interests, and more.  Some common ways that social media can help with cheating spouse investigations include:  

• Finding evidence of an affair on their profile such as photos or messages from a suspected partner.
• Determining where they’re spending time based off of check-ins at specific locations. 
• Listening for keywords in posts that might suggest infidelity.
• Verifying stories based on what is posted online by their friends or family, and many more.

In this article, we’re going to try and help you explore how social media can be used, what it does well, and what it doesn’t do well. 

If you’re curious about this topic or would like more information on it, please request a consultation. We’d love to help.

The first thing we need to address is whether or not a social media investigation is needed or if they’re useful in a cheating spouse case. The answer to this question is … it depends on your goals and expectations. Are we trying to gather information on a subject? Then yes, social media sites can give us information to aid our investigators. Are you expecting social media to give us a: HERE IS THE AFFAIR SIGN!!! As amazing as this would be, that’s extremely rare. Are you looking to hack into an account? That’s illegal and is not something we can help you with. 

Social media can be very helpful when conducting an investigation because you get access to information that a subject might not share with their partner. In our agency, we call this type of information involuntary data leaks. A data leak occurs when a partner shares information about a location that’s “innocent” but ends up providing our investigators with a wealth of information. 

Example that We can share is: A clients’ spouse had to stay late at work for a last minute project. The spouses’ co-worker backed up this story. A different co-worker’s wife (not in on the ruse) posted an image with our client’s spouse in the background having drinks with a suspected work affair partner – at a local brewery / work event.

This type of data leak is an excellent example of how Social Media Investigations can help. 

Social media, while powerful, can’t fully prove infidelity without some sort of actual surveillance or investigation. Again, just because we were able to prove the subject was being deceitful, it doesn’t mean they were having an affair. At the end of the day, it was a combined effort of surveillance and social media that pieced the dots for our client.

Social Media investigations do hold their place in the investigative field, but they’re not the end all be all to investigations. They do have their limitations.

For starters, we’re limited to the carelessness of the subject. Some people that we investigate are very good at covering their social media tracks. The subject may not even have a social media account, when that’s the case, we’re forced to track down the subject via acquaintances. Again, look at the example above – it wasn’t the subject of our investigation, it was a spouse who didn’t know any better. Her actions helped us prove that the subject was being deceitful.

We do have MAJOR legal limitations. Some clients call us asking for information that simply can’t be accessed – even for a private investigator. As a licensed agency in Florida (or any other agency in the United States for that matter) we’re not able to hack a social media account. That’s simply not possible, and it’s outright illegal in the United States. 

We are also not able to intercept messages, redirect messages, clone messages, or the like. We can’t see private information, nor can we see email correspondence. These are all legal restrictions that require a judge’s order. Not only is this very difficult to get, but Facebook, Google, and Apple are notorious for saying NO!

Regardless of our clients’ needs, our team of investigators always conducts social media investigations on all our cases, whether they are needed or not. Depending on what we find, we can conduct a deeper cyber investigation when needed. At the very least, we’re able to learn more about our subject and better predict what they are going to do, where they are going to be, and who we’re looking at when we conduct our investigations.