Lights, camera action: Catching philanderers is a full-time job

Key-hole investigators are earning big as insecure spouses set sleuths after their partners in search for intractable evidence of cheating, writes KENNETH KWAMA.

A growing population of Kenyans who have lost trust with their spouses are hiring the services of secret spying agencies to track down suspected philanderers. This has propped up a lucrative underworld business worth billions of shillings.

Most spy agencies draw their customers from an estimated 400,000 Kenyans living abroad, some of who reportedly pay between Sh79,000 and Sh1.2 million to have their partners back home monitored for infidelity.

"Most of our customers are in the Diaspora. The job has made me very busy and hardly get time for other things," says George Muriungi, a sleuth with Spylink International —an infidelity-investigating firm.

Muriungi told Business Unusual he had more than 40 clients on the waiting list by the time of the interview.

The business is so secretive and lucrative, minting fortunes for the few who are daring enough to venture into it.

In its own way, the business could be partly responsible for the circulation of the Sh164 billion that Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) once said had mysteriously found its way into the economy since the business can’t be monitored because of its nature.

At the height of the speculations, a special team set up by the CBK and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics began probing the murky source of an estimated Sh164 billion.

There was speculation at the time that the money could have been part of ransom paid to Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean.

Locals who want the services of infidelity investigators are required to pay a minimum of Sh25,000.

The price can, however, go up depending on the duration and complexity of the investigations.

"Sometimes, an investigation can require suspects to be followed for as long as one month. The price charged will depend on a number of factors, including where they meet, itinerary and risk profile of the job," says another investigator who requested not to be named because of the nature of disclosures he made during this interview.

"There are jobs that require the investigator to board a plane with the subjects to other towns and lodge alongside them in expensive high-end hotels in order to get the evidence. These ones will definitely cost more," says the investigator.

The retired police investigator counts among his former clients the wives of two cabinet ministers, the wife of a well -known businessman and an airhostess.

In all these cases, he claims he provided them intractable evidence about their partners’ philandering ways.

According to the investigator, clients are usually required to provide the itinerary of the person they want investigated including the suspect’s workplace, time when they leave for work and depart.

Other details required include phone numbers, interests, including whether they go for extracurricular activities and restaurants or hangouts they like going to.

If the suspect has a car, the investigator can attach a tracking device to enable easy monitoring although our source tells us that this is not preferred as it very expensive.

"We have to rely a lot on the client to execute the most critical moves. For example, we need to listen in on some phone conversations to know what someone is up to," says the source.

"To be able to do this, we give our clients or their subjects a special device to attach to the suspect’s phone for about one-minute. The gadget can download special software we use to listen in on the suspect’s conversations."

Although he declined to tell Business Unusual the name of the software, we have since established the software could very easily be FlexiSpy.

In the West, investigators pursuing cases of infidelity have been relying on this spy software, which is manually installed on the phone of the person being spied on.

It enables snoops to secretly record other people’s text messages, view call history, and even secretly listen in on conversations by remotely activating their earphones.

Symantec, the information security firm whose software is widely used in Nokia phones, early last year warned that mobile phones were potentially vulnerable to the spy software. But Vervata, the company behind FlexiSpy, denied any wrongdoing.

FlexiSpy allows infidelity investigators to listen in on private conversations and use a miniature video camera mounted on a pen to capture the images. With these collections, investigators supply clients with the evidence they need to prove a spouse’s infidelity.

Research carried out in 2008 by Synovate (formerly Steadman) shows there is potential for further growth in this business. The survey showed 41 per cent of Kenyans would spy on their spouses for infidelity.

It also showed more than half (65 per cent) of the married in Nairobi would spy on their spouses, if need be.

Data obtained in Kenya’s eight provinces ranks Nairobi as the leading in spouse spies — with 65 per cent followed by Coast Province with 49 per cent residents saying they wouldn’t mind spying on their spouses.

Rift Valley came third with 43 per cent, Central 41 per cent while Nyanza and Eastern had 34 per cent, each.

In Western, 33 per cent would consider spying on their spouses, while people with partners from North Eastern — with 32 per cent — had the least reason to worry about being spied on.

An Australian research firm, Telstra, conducted a separate and unrelated study the same year, which revealed it was much easier to bust cheating men, but more difficult to nab women.

"Men were reported as worst cheats, with 26 per cent of women finding saucy text messages on their partners’ phones compared to 16 per cent men," noted Telstra.

Sources within the industry indicate that most of those setting spies after their spouses are mainly located in the US, UK, Canada and the United Arab Emirates whose capital Dubai hosts close to 37,000 Kenyans.

The number of Kenyans working abroad has continued to swell as people move out in droves to seek greener pastures, sometimes leaving behind young husbands and wives whose ‘fires’, our source says, ‘needs to be continually quenched.’

Last year, Kenyans in the Diaspora sent home Sh46.3 billion. Remittances are a significant source of foreign exchange for the country’s economy, coming after horticulture, tea and tourism.

There is, however, significant part of these remittances that can’t be easily accounted for because of the nature in which the money was sent.

For example, Business Unusual gathered that most of the people in the Diaspora who enlist the services of infidelity investigators do not use official money sending agencies like Western Union.

"Most of them don’t want to leave paper trails, which could be damning evidence if their partners back home got to know," says one investigator.

"They simply wrap the dollars or pounds then send to us via post or courier as a normal parcel."

So how do you guarantee clients that you are not fake? We pose.

"Come I show you," the investigator tells this writer who follows him to his car. There, he reveals the cover of the pen and shows what looks like a USB stick, which he sticks into a USB port on his vehicle’s dashboard and replays the entire interview with pictures.