Many couples in the capital, married or otherwise, after failing in love, are turning to private detective agencies to spy on their partners and are prepared to pay a hefty fee for this exercise.
“After dating for over three years, I got married to Meera (name changed), my wife. We were in love with each other, but soon after our marriage, I noticed some changes in her behaviour. She started using different pass codes for her mobile, and she would always be on her phone. This was when I started having suspicions about her. I shared these things with a friend of mine, who suggested that I conduct a loyalty test on her through one of the private detective agencies. I found out that she was dating another guy whom she met through Facebook. I was devastated by the news,” Sanjay (name changed) told The Sunday Guardian.
Technology and the advent of social networking sites seem to have led to growing distrust among couples in the national capital. People have easy access to mediums like WhatsApp, Facebook, Tinder, Happn, among many other such applications, through which they can meet new people and indulge in infidelity.
This has also given rise to a significant number of cases of “love snooping” where couples are paying hefty fees to hire private detective agencies to spy on their partners to check whether they are loyal to them, according to several private detective agencies involved in such cases. Couples here are shelling out as much as Rs 25,000 to Rs 30,000 for each case of snooping, as this is the average fee charged by such private detective agencies in the capital.
Ravi Kumar, who has been a detective himself and presently is the director of Apex private detective agency, said that the use of social networking sites and WhatsApp have led to a sense of disconnect between couples, leading to a rise in the number of “loyalty test cases”.
Kumar told The Sunday Guardian, “These days, we get a lot of cases for loyalty tests from both married and unmarried couples. There seems to be a sense of disconnect between couples as most of them are busy with their phones using social networking sites. And in most of the cases, couples fail the loyalty test. We have also come to understand that such meet-ups and extra-marital relationships are happening because of social networking sites where both men and women are spending most of their time these days.”
Not only such cases, even pre-matrimonial investigations are also on demand, as both couples and parents are keen to know in detail the private lives of their partners before a marriage is finalised. “There have been increasing instances of people coming to us for pre-marriage background checks, as distrust among people has been growing when it comes to marriages. And we do find people lying to their partners in many of our cases. In a pre-marriage background test, we have several sets of check-lists that we run through for our clients,” Ravi said.
Akriti Khatri, a female detective who specialises in personal and individual cases, said she had to face a lot of resistance in the field, which is predominantly male-dominated. She herself has been a field detective for several years and has solved many important cases, which she did not want to divulge for the sake of confidentiality, which is very important in her profession.
According to Khatri, her field involves a lot of challenges which could at times also be life threatening. However, according to her, the advent of technology has made the job easier.
Khatri told this newspaper: “I had chosen this field as I was personally interested in investigations. But it wasn’t easy. Today, I have solved a lot of cases of importance. With time, we have also been seeing a rise in the number of cases that we have been receiving on a month-on-month basis. It is more because of awareness and a sense of suspicion among young couples.”