A number of the major mobile phone service providers offer “family locator” products which give parents the ability to see the real time location of their child on interactive maps they can view on the computer or smart phone. Parents can also define locations or areas, and receive updates when their children arrive at or depart from those locations, or enter/exit pre-set boundaries. Verizon and Sprint each offer “family locator” products, which cost between $5 and $10 a month, and are easy to set up, use and maintain.

AshleyMadison.com, a personals website with the telling slogan “Life is short, have an affair”, has iPhone and Blackberry applications designed to help married people find partners without leaving a trace of the affair on work or home computers.

So if you suspect your spouse is cheating and see the AshleyMadison.com app on his or her phone, you should consider your suspicions confirmed.

TigerText reminds me of the self-destructing messages in the movie Mission Impossible. The way it works is that when you send an iPhone or BlackBerry message via TigerText, the recipient will be prompted to install the app in order to read the message. The message then disappears after a predetermined length of time so a suspicious spouse won’t be able to read it later. Without this digital evidence of an affair, suspecting spouses will have to resort to other investigative methods like GPS tracking or good, old-fashioned surveillance to trap their cheating spouses.

Have an accomplice. Paul Young helped facilitate and hide the affair in a number of ways. From booking hotel rooms under his name to falsely claiming paternity of Edwards’ and Hunter’s love child, he was the perfect accomplice (until he wrote his tell-all book, that is).

Don’t call your lover with your regular cell phone. Incriminating text messages and call logs have been the downfall of many adulterers, most recently Tiger Woods. Edwards cleverly bought a cell phone that he used exclusively to talk to Hunter. He would then hand off the phone to Young so that Elizabeth could never stumble upon it. He and Hunter would also dial into three-way conference calls, scheduled by Young, so there would be no trace of her phone number on his call log.

Don’t leave written evidence. After the birth of their love child, Edwards sent Hunter flowers, but did not sign the card in his name in case someone saw it.

Don’t use your credit card. A credit card statement can be essentially a diary of a sloppy adulterer’s affair. When Edwards started paying Hunter’s living expenses, he made sure to send her cash and her own credit card through Young. He even managed to avoid using his own funds, funneling her money from wealthy campaign donor Bunny Mellon through an elaborate cover-up.

The most prominent recent example is Tiger Woods: After allegedly carrying on secret affairs with numerous women over several years, he was finally undone by text messages sent to Rachel Uchitel, the first mistress to be unveiled. A friend of hers told the National Enquirer about the affair, claiming she had seen incriminating text messages. The published rumors likely led to Tiger’s fight with his wife, Elin Nordegren, and subsequent car accident. For further embarrassment, another one of Tiger’s mistresses, Jaimee Grubbs, then gave illicit text messages incriminating Tiger to US Weekly, which then published them.

Most cheating spouses probably don’t have to worry about their “sext” messages being published in a tabloid magazine, but this story should still send shivers down a texting adulterer’s spine. It’s clear that as with emails, text messages can be retrieved. Even if both the sender and receiver delete the incriminating text message from their phone, communications providers like AT&T and Verizon store them for up to a few weeks.

According to this article in the New York Times, text messages are now considered proof of an affair in a court of law. Although cell phones are considered private property, if a cheating spouse’s cell phone is part of a family calling plan or often left unlocked and unattended around the house, a suspecting partner could legally be justified in checking the messages.

Question: Is it possible to have sim cards from cell phones uploaded to recover deleted text messages? If so, is this a service that you offer? What is the average cost of this?

Answer: We do have technology that can extract the data off sim cards. The data includes call logs and text messages, even deleted messages. The cost depends on the type of phone so please call us at 1-888-789-FACT to discuss.

Feel free to send me any other questions that you have by submitting a comment to this post. I’ll answer them all on this blog. Of course, if you want a private reply, let me know!