Sleuthing to find your husband’s dating profiles requires a bit of creativity and a lot of trial and error. A critical step is finding the first profile. Once you have found it, you can begin google searching the pieces of the profile, iteratively unearthing more and more of the puzzle.

I. Methods for Discovering Dating Profiles

Create Dummy Profiles to Search for His Profile

The most straightforward way to discover a cheating spouse’s dating profiles is to become a member of the dating sites you suspect he is using. Dating sites have search parameters allowing you to narrow your search by age, location, education, job and many other characteristics. With some trial and error, you may find his profile relatively quickly. There also is the unfortunate and embarrassing possibility one of your friends will discover your husband has a profile on Match.com, Plenty of Fish (POF.com), OKCupid or any of a number of other dating sites and then tell you about it.

There are two challenges with this as an active search approach, however. First, it presumes he has included his picture in the dating profile. Members are identified by username, not their actual name. Unless you know his username, the only clear evidence it is him is his picture. Scott had picture-less profiles on all of the dating sites I found.

Second, this search method requires that you know where your spouse is looking for affair partners. This was a challenge in my case, because I knew Scott was hooking up with women from New Hampshire down to Philadelphia. That was just his regular action on the eastern seaboard! As a result, this method of finding his profiles was not feasible for me.

Exploiting Quirks in the Dating Websites

It is well worth your time to at least investigate the dating websites you know he has frequented to see if you can find out his username. Scott paid for a premium membership to many of the dating websites he used. As a result, I was able to identify them through the credit card records. One credit card charge in particular was to a company hosting a number of dating websites. When I accessed the company’s website and entered his phone number, the dating website and username associated with the phone number was identified. I then created a dummy membership to the dating site and used the advanced search option to search by username.

Resurrect old Emails

The particular trick I used to obtain the biggest trove of Scott’s on-line profiles and Craigslist ads was in learning several of his hidden emails had been terminated. The simple way of uncovering a terminated email is to request it as your new email. If the system (in my case it was Yahoo), allows you to do this then the email is now yours. Of course, you will not have access to any of the emails he may have sent or received. They were deleted when he terminated the account.

You can, however access all of the profiles (including Craigslist) associated with the resurrected email, if his memberships are still active. This requires using the email to sign into the account and indicating you have lost your password.

The site will ask for the email associated with the account (to the email you have resurrected), so they can send a link to reset your password

Going to the email’s inbox, you will find an email with a link to reset your password for the dating site which will also get you into to the account associated with the email.

This method worked for the following sites:

• Ashley Madison
• Match.com
• Sugardaddie.com
• SeekingArrangement.com
• Sugardaddieforme.com
• Craigslist

Though I didn’t receive his email history when I resurrected the terminated emails, I did learn of a few other dating websites he frequented when ads for the websites started showing up in the email inbox (Hotflings and sugarbaby4u).

Googling to Find Additional Profiles

Once you have found the first profile, you can extend your search by googling elements of the profile to see if they turn up any additional profiles. This is where the trial and error element of the search comes in. I googled his username, his picture and even text from his profile. For example, when I googled his Ashley Madison username, bestNSAfriend, his profile on Sexsearch.com was revealed.

 

II. Can You Find Him on a Location-Based Dating App?

When Scott entered the online world of dating, hookups, sugar daddies, and affairs, it was largely something occurring through internet websites and email. New technology has produced an alternative approach for someone like Scott, specifically using a cellphone with location-based dating apps such as

• Tinder
• Blender
• Coffee Meets Bagel
• And many others

Many of the traditional online dating sites now have location-based phone apps as well (Match, Ashley Madison, Ok Cupid, Plenty of Fish and others). My strong suspicion is Scott is now on these apps too. The quick hit formula (swipe left if you don’t like, right if you do) is a good fit for his addictive personality.

Tracking someone on these apps requires a different approach as it is tied to the phone and a location instead of an email and website. In the online world, you identify the geographic area for your search but you don’t need to physically be in the location to do the searching. In the app world, your phone needs to be in the geographic location.

To find his profile when he is using a dating app, set up a fake account on the suspected app with someone else’s picture or no picture at all. Many dating apps also require linking to a facebook account, so you may need to set up a dummy facebook account too. Finding his profile requires activating yours on the app while he is on it and being in the same general locale.

If he is using these apps away from home, it is a bit more difficult. Fortunately you do not need to be in the location he is in to find him. There are location emulator apps you can download. With these, you are able to use the app AS IF you are in another location. If he travels to White Plains on business and you live in Massachusetts, you could use the emulator to “pretend” you are in White Plains using the app. However, this approach does require knowing the locations he is in, when he is there and when he might have the app activated.

 

III. When Should You Stop?

During my divorce process, well-meaning family and friends often asked why I kept investigating Scott’s on-line behavior. Didn’t I know enough, already? Wasn’t this getting a bit obsessive?

I wasn’t self aware enough at the time to provide a reason, but I did confidently say I didn’t feel bad about doing it and would stop when I was good and ready. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe my behavior was a response to Scott having so thoroughly gaslighted me. I believed his story that he had just the one mistress. Worse, I believed his narrative that my inattention was the underlying cause of his infidelity. I believed this up until the moment he moved out of the house.

Once I started to uncover his compulsive lying, I felt compelled to dig to find the truth. Each time I uncovered another thread, it nearly always led to an uglier truth. There never seemed to be a bottom to it. Juxtaposed against this was the family man image Scott had built for himself. In one of his Craigslist ads, after bragging extensively about his “intimacy skills,” Scott added “If you met me on the street you would never guess that I am the person I described above.” Even he understood the his behavior was against type.

The disconnect between family man Scott and sex hound Scott was significant enough I believed I needed hard proof of his secret life. I just didn’t think friends and family would believe my narrative unless I could back it up with evidence. Even I sometimes had trouble believing Scott was the creep shown in the evidence. In retrospect, my continued search helped me to maintain confidence in the truly slimy narrative I had uncovered.