Being a former journalism hack, I recognize a puff piece passing for journalism when I encounter them. You’ve likely encountered some of these content pieces in the form of “top cheating apps” or “Top phone downloads for cheaters”.
Such stories come out every few months. I suspect they run them on slow news days. If you have, you’ve probably noticed a common thread to these stories. They focus on websites that help people cheat on their partner.
Blindsided by the selection bias inherent in this type of story? You’re not alone. Still these articles are published almost religiously , even though many of them point towards content benefitting the cheater.
It’s almost like the top 10 country music charts that change weekly.
I decided finding out for myself what the top cheating apps are along with what I learned in chasing down information from those stories.
I went to Google play and looked up the number of downloads for those apps mentioned as popular cheating apps. (This information is based on 2015 findings) This is what I found:
1. (tie) History Eraser and Vault Hide each with a whopping 10 million downloads. One is a data eraser to eliminate traces of activity on the phone, while the other sets up a hidden compartment on the user’s phone, allowing them to hide information from prying eyes.
3. Vaulty Stocks. This one appears as an innocent stock tracking application. When you plug in the correct code, you have access to chats, photos, etc.
It reminds me of a popular men’s club in the Houston area that when I was growing up. The club used multiple charge name plates to keep prying eyes from knowing where wandering husbands actually spent their money and time.
The charge slips had innocent sounding restaurants rather than the true identity of the cabaret where the charge occurred. The free download had 5 million takers.
4-7 (tie) Wiper, Hide My Texts, Invisible Text and Private SMS & Call . Wiper is intriguing in that it wipes the text messages on the users phone AND on whoever’s phone the text was sent to. Hide My Text is self-explanatory.
Invisible texts hides the text messages, unless you have the code to read it. This insures that they are not seen by unauthorized eyes. Private SMS & Call allows several features.
You can block certain SMS (text) messages from the senders you list. There is also an option to move texts from specified parties be moved to the ‘private area’. The Private Call SMS & Call offers still more, with the privacy option keeping calls from even being included on the call log of the phone. Each of these had one million or more downloads a piece.
8-9 (tie) Ashley Madison and Tiger Text. Ashely Madison is pretty obvious. It connects users with the Ashley Madison service that caters to setting up affairs.
Tiger Text allows users to send time limited text messages. It is like a Snapchat for text messages. Each of these have had 500,000+ downloads.
10. Wickr. This app does a lot. It advertises as “being self-destructing, secure private, encrypted, anonymous messaging”. This app allows secrecy regarding messages, setting up chats with multiple parties, allows you to contact people regularly without them being listed as one of your contacts, removes geo-information from images and texts, allows you to set time limits on the texts that are sent, and removes deleted files without a trace. It’s a real-life mission impossible self-destructing program.
There are also other popular applications, but at present this it the top 10 as measured by actual downloads.
Some of what I learned is that hiding and erasing are the functions of the top downloads. The old tried and true methods of hiding information or erasing it are the preferred ways of doing things.
I admit that I’m not super-computer savvy and deleting texts doesn’t always seem to work as well as the programs claim they do.
Texting is definitely preferred over traditional phone talking. Fortunately, as our society changes and we are able to get more of our information online, there is a better chance that some of the disappearing acts might be caught in cyber-space. And if they are not that may be because it is too late to do anything about them anyway.
It surprised me that the texting apps were more popular than the dialing apps. Even though there are ways of hiding the number you are calling from, cheaters prefer texting to talking.
This is different than previous generations where the focus was on talking to the lover or online chatting.
Cheaters as a group are more focused on cleaning up rather than preventing problems. Instead of using scramblers that reveal messages with secret codes, they would rather have the full text messages/conversations and hide them.
I am not sure if that is so that they have reminders or mementos of their activities or that they often do not think things through. This is a vulnerability. If you are wanting to catch them, chances are they have the incriminating texts hidden somewhere in their phone.
Bear in mind that many of the apps hide themselves on the phone. You may not know they have even been downloaded. Some only show up after a special code is punched in.
This means that if you’re looking on their phone for apps, you will need some sophistication in just finding all the ones they have and are using. It is no longer looking at the call log to see what numbers have been called out to and who called in or looking at their contacts. With sophisticated cheaters, they know how to cover each of those areas.
If you discover that cheating is going on or has gone on, the ‘Affair Recovery Workshop‘ guides you through the ups and downs of affair recovery. You can know what to bring up along with ways of doing it in dealing with the affair.
Best Regards,
Jeff
