Dumped husband offers answer to cyber affairs

By CLAIRE TREVETT

Spurned American husband John LaSage has set up a "chat cheaters" website after his wife left him and their two teenage daughters without warning in 1999 for a New Zealand man she met online.

The website - which offers advice, surveillance equipment and first-person stories of betrayal - averages 500 visitors a day, mostly women, Mr LaSage said.

The site carries links to GPS vehicle-tracking devices for US$450 ($782) and computer-spying programs (US$100).

Mr LaSage said his wife disappeared one day while he was at church. A police inquiry revealed she had left the country.

He dredged through her computer files and discovered she was having erotic e-mail and chatroom conversations with five men. However, he did not hear from her until the divorce papers arrived three months later.

He said he found out she was in New Zealand two weeks ago, after she contacted their daughters.

Her disappearance prompted him to set up the website, which offered advice and equipment needed for electronic spying.

Mr LaSage said his wife was hooked on the internet "like a drug addict".

"When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was writing a romance novel. She was writing it all right, but she was living it, too."

He said he trusted her. He said that partners could be cheating on the internet without thinking of it as infidelity.

"My gauge is if you have to hide what you're doing when someone comes in, and you're frantically clicking away to hide it and closing windows, you're doing something wrong."

The surge in cyber affairs had given rise to a new market for do-it-yourself technology for electronic spying.

Wellington privacy lawyer John Edwards said there were privacy issues about electronic spying. However it was not illegal. Tracking the e-mails of spouses or children without consent was probably not a breach of the Privacy Act.

However, there were situations where tracking key-strokes was illegal. An example was if an internet cafe tracked passwords and log-ins of users, especially if they were then used for fraudulent purposes.

Chat cheaters