Have you ever had the suspicion that your partner might be cheating on you? Traditionally, when alarm bells ring, you might try to sneak a peek at your partner’s phone or enlist the help of a sleuthing acquaintance. But now, thanks to TikTok, there’s an online service for that.
Introducing ‘loyalty tests’: where suspicious clients call on the help of TikTok or Instagram love detectives to see if their partners cheat when approached on social media. As part of the test, the sleuther will flirt with the partner and then provide any evidence of cheating to their client, as well as posting the entire ordeal on TikTok (with names and identity obscured).
Think of it as modern-day honey trapping, repurposed for the social media age. And its big business: the hashtag #loyaltytest has 3.6 billion views on TikTok, while #loyaltycheck has amassed 557 million. As loyalty testers boom in popularity, more creators have started charging for their services to cope with demand – with some earning up to £1,500 a week.
Brookelyn and her partner Emre, both 18 and from the US, have run a loyalty testing service on their TikTok and Instagram for around a year, and charge an initial fee of $15 (£12) – they are currently making around $700 (£554) a week. On a ‘good week’ Emre estimates they get around 100 requests, and they are even working on developing an app to keep up with demand.
‘I chat with the girl [almost all their clients are female] and give her some details and then we start the test,’ says Brookelyn. ‘How long the test takes depends on when [their partner] replies... sometimes it can be a week or even a month. I’m constantly updating [the client] through the process, and Emre is also logged into the account so we can manage it at the same time.’
All the tests then follow a similar formula, with extra charges if the client wants more details. ‘I’ll say, “Hey, you’re cute, where are you from, are you single?” with some small talk thrown in – those cost $15,’ Brookelyn says. ‘If they want to keep it going, I charge another $15, so it’s $30 for all-in tests, which will be a longer, more genuine conversation between me and the guy.’
These all-in tests have even led to Brookelyn scheduling ‘meetings’ with some of the cheating partners, but only so the girlfriend can confront them at the other end. ‘I always block the guy when I know the girlfriend’s about to confront, because I don’t want to get any bad messages,’ she adds. Emre says that boyfriends have even rung them when they are speaking on iMessage. ‘Sometimes, we use the merging button to merge the girl and the guy in together while Brookelyn talks to them, so the girl can hear live what the guy says,’ he explains. ‘Since it’s not on a message, they talk freely. They will totally be like, “I have a girlfriend, maybe we can meet up on the side,” while their girlfriend is on the call,’ Brookelyn explains.
Becca Moore, 25, is a content creator living in the US, who started doing loyalty tests in lockdown. She now has 1.3 million followers on TikTok, and 236,000 on Instagram. Before even hearing about the trend, she says a girl messaged her ‘organically’ asking if she could reach out to her boyfriend because he ‘liked blonde girls’ and she looked like his type. ‘I never even planned to make a video about it until someone commented and said, “You should do this thing called a loyalty test.” I didn’t even know there was a name for it. I started doing them for content online and it blew up – it was crazy,’ she says.
At her peak, Becca was doing around 10 loyalty tests a day and was getting messages for hundreds more. She says she didn’t charge for her tests because she used the videos for content, with names and identities redacted. ‘Usually, the girl would tell me what would work on her boyfriend,’ she says. She would only test people who had no ‘baggage in the relationship’, such as marriage, children or a shared living situation, she explains, and always kept in mind that she was doing it ‘for the girls’.
While hiring someone else to uncover infidelity might sound extreme, there’s always been a market for private investigators to snoop for scorned lovers. This is just how it’s done in the TikTok age. However, it has always raised somewhat of an ethical question and, with technology and the sharing of private messages involved with this, it’s arguably more complicated now.
'The ethics are murky,’ explains Dr Julia Carter, senior lecturer in sociology, specialising in marriage and relationships, at UWE Bristol. ‘But the history of honey- trapping goes back a long way and is not a new invention with social media. Therefore, ethically, I wonder if it is very different from enlisting an IRL detective to uncover infidelity. Nevertheless, since social media allows and enables a more public invasion of privacy as well as communication and connectedness, we are still in the process of working out where our moral and ethical boundaries fit with its use.’
For many of the creators, the worst part is having to tell the person that their partner is cheating. ‘It’s so terrible – it makes you feel a bit guilty and you have thoughts like, “What if they were happy before?”, says Becca. ‘I calmed myself by thinking, “If they were happy before, they wouldn’t be coming to me for loyalty tests.”’
Becca hasn’t done a loyalty test for two years because, as she gained more followers, it became harder to test people as they would research her. ‘It was also making me really mistrust men, so I took a break,’ she adds.
Brookelyn and Emre estimate that the ‘cheat rate’ for their tests tends to be about 60%. Since Brookelyn ‘connects’ with many of her clients, she agrees that telling them the result can be tricky. ‘They usually feel shame and a lot of the time they don’t tell anyone, even their friends, that they are doing a test on their boyfriend, so I’m the only person they’re talking to,’ she says.
So how can you avoid ending up in a messy situation that could see you hiring a love detective? Relationship expert Sarah Louise Ryan says it’s important to define your boundaries early on in a relationship. ‘Some people think that cheating is chatting to someone else, some think it’s kissing, and many think it’s penetrative sex. Some think having an emotional affair that has no sexual intimacy is also cheating,’ she says.
Wherever your boundaries lie, if you suspect your partner of crossing them, for better or for worse, discovering the truth is only a few clicks away.