Stephen McDermott
I’VE CAUGHT MYSELF behaving badly.
Over the past couple of months, Facebook has been targeting me with ads for digital private detectives who claim they can expose what people in my life are furtively doing on their phones.
“It only took 2 minutes to find the truth,” one testimonial told me. “I’m finally free to move on. Discover if your partner is hiding a secret online profile.”
The pitch is that an army of online sleuths can dig up someone else’s WhatsApp messages or unearth their dating app profiles.
They claim to work by using a person’s mobile phone number to find “deleted messages”, “secret contacts”, “late night chats” and so on.
Knowing my own behaviour, I was curious about what kind of suspicious activity I’d be accused of and what else one of these machines could invent.
I put my own phone number into one of the sites, and the results were surprising because they told me things I apparently didn’t know about myself.
Apparently my number matches active accounts on Tinder and Bumble, and was exchanging late-night WhatsApp messages while I was asleep (none of these things is true).
But there was also a catch: the service I used told me I’d have to pay a subscription fee to see the full report, which I was told would let me see the dating app profiles and the messages I’d sent at 3am.
My experiment exposed the lie behind millions of ads that are flooding Facebook in the hope of cashing in on the paranoia of users, though it also showed me that the business model can play into digital scopophilia and the urge to look simply because something has been made visible.
It’s a case study in how the internet pulls people in: you don’t have to make something convincing if you can make it just interesting enough to engage with.
Anyone who recognises the language of fake testimonials in these ads (“I was completely shocked when I checked those messages!”) or who’s heard about GDPR and end-to-end encryption can clock straight away that the services aren’t legitimate.
That hasn’t stopped those who are behind them from trying.
The digital investigations site Indicator recently found tens of thousands of ads for 24 of these so-called ‘cheater buster’ websites on Meta, which promised things like being able to “go through” a partner’s phone or to “find deleted texts”.
The ones I saw unsubtly tried to put ideas in my mind and create phantom truths by offering to “expose secrets, lies, and betrayals”, to give me “peace of mind”, and told me I could “get clarity in seconds”.
They presented suspicion as personal responsibility, suggesting that the mature thing to do in such a moment would be to run a covert audit on someone rather than to trust them.
It’s the usual scammer playbook: you won’t fool 99% of people, but there’ll always be a small percentage of individuals whose desperation or nosiness will leave them blinkered enough to be lured in.
Scams like this are a dime a dozen on Facebook these days, but this one in particular also taps into a bigger phenomenon related to how social media has warped our brains.
First, they amplify the idea that people are only their true selves online, where they can pander to their basest impulses unseen – or, in the words of one ad, “people lie; phones don’t”.
They also play into the unspoken acceptance that anything that’s posted online – Instagram pictures, off-hand opinions, our job history – is up for grabs.
People believe that to varying degrees, but ultimately the pitch of “cheater buster” websites is to sell the panopticon back to ordinary people as a consumer service.
If the information is out there, why not take it? If the person hasn’t done anything wrong, have they anything to be worried about?
Some may justify this even more if they’re prompted by ads that tell them someone could be engaging in immoral behaviour and that they may have been stupid enough to leave an online paper trail.
Of course, it’s different when scammers give fake information suggesting a person is texting someone else in secret in the dead of night, but there’d undoubtedly be a market for these kinds of services if they were legitimate and the law allowed for it.
Advertising is traditionally about subtly selling people better versions of themselves or more comfortable world, so it was interesting to see sponsored posts selling people a darker version of reality.
They suggest that suspicion – rather than secure emotional boundaries and trustworthiness – is a form of self-care that offer a path to greater enlightenment.
That may be a con, but it still taps into a legitimate urge people have on social media to look at pretty much anything that’s put in front of them.
It’s what led me to put my own number into a scam service, just to indulge myself to see what lies it would tell, even if my valuable clicks only encourage the scammers more.
It turns out bad behaviour comes in different forms.