From Cheating Exposés to Dating Background Checks, TikTok Detectives Are Thriving

It’s a dark November night in Los Angeles. The car in front is lit by its rear lights only. After driving for 20 miles, it stops, suddenly, in the middle of the street. A man in a dark T-shirt gets out and runs toward an apartment. A woman appears and jumps up, wrapping her legs around him. They start making out before going to get tacos and, later, returning to her place.

At 6 am the next morning his car is still outside the woman’s apartment. A few hours later, they emerge holding hands, heading to a local farmer’s market where they kiss and hug publicly.

The whole time, a private investigator named Stephanie A., who goes by Your Fav Investigator online, has been sending videos of the interaction to the man’s wife, who she says hired her to sleuth for suspected infidelity. Once presented with the video evidence, Stephanie says, she never heard from the wife again, but the video remains on her social feeds. While the man’s face is obscured and no personal information is revealed, the video of his misdoings has been “liked” by over 85,000 people on Stephanie’s Instagram. Infidelity stake-out videos on Instagram and TikTok titled ‘Trust your gut … CASED CLOSED!’ and ‘Pickleball or cheating?’ are her bread and butter.

“I love everything” about being a PI Stephanie, 39, explains over Zoom. “The investigation prior to the case, the adrenaline rush during surveillance. I really enjoy helping people find peace of mind or clarity in their situations.” She did not want her last name used due to the nature of her work.

With a family history in law enforcement and a background in loss prevention, Stephanie is at the vanguard of a new wave of very online private investigators, often focused on outing cheaters, with each of them sharing the ins and outs of the PI life to massive TikTok followings in the US and beyond. And true crime-obsessed audiences are eating it up.

“People love the tea. It’s like riding shotgun into someone else’s drama,” says Stephanie.

Once relegated to hidden-camera reality shows like Cheaters, dozens of prominent social media PIs have sprung up over the past few years, focusing on topics like insurance fraud, missing persons, and even high-stakes heists. But by far the most viral videos center on infidelity, with the most popular internet PIs carrying out surveillance and even background checks on men their clients have deemed suspicious.

“It still shocks me how bold some people are, not just lying and cheating openly in public but sleeping over and playing house while their spouse is out of town,” says Stephanie, who has been working as a private investigator for 12 years.

The boom in these investigations comes at a time when online shaming around cheating seems to have reached a fever pitch, the most recent example being former Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, who was caught tightly embracing his company’s chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16.

The couple scattered from the Jumbotron’s gaze—Byron literally diving out of frame—prompting Coldplay frontman Chris Martin to quip, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”

Predictably, the footage went massively viral, resulting in both Bryon’s and Cabots’ resignations and Byron’s wife being inundated with Facebook messages from strangers offering their sympathies. The moment has also been endlessly memed and turned into a video game, and online betting companies are offering odds on whether the ensnared couples are going to get divorced.

It’s easy, in what to most is an entertaining internet lark, to forget that people’s very real lives are impacted by exposés such as this. And while many people believe that justice is being served in public cheating scandals, others feel that intense surveillance tools should not be deployed on strangers, particularly ones who are not public figures.

Still, there's no denying that there’s a massive audience for the cottage industry of influencer investigators.

Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor in media studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and a writer on internet literacy, says there’s a rawness to these social media stings that appeals to the public.

“We like watching true-crime content [on social media], because we can lean into a plot that isn't scripted or gate-kept by traditional media. There's no executive producer or editors; it's happening in fairly real time.”

Like all good crime novels, the best stakeouts have numerous twists and turns. Lisa Allen-Stell, who runs her own agency, Pink Lady Investigations in California, recalls being hired on a two-year contract by a married man who wanted to make sure that his mistress—who was also married—wasn’t in a third relationship with his married best friend. Keeping up so far? It turns out that the best friend was spending most of his time with men, not with the mistress.

Allen-Stell got into online investigating after a “horrible” divorce and custody battle made her empathetic to the plight of women in similar circumstances. So far she has racked up 1.4 million likes on various stakeout videos and stories about her work as a PI.

All of the PIs interviewed for this piece have completed the relevant training in their local jurisdiction, but certification requirements differ across states and countries—some, like Idaho, don’t require any. And while PIs like Stephanie and Allen-Stell don’t market themselves as influencers, they do utilize popular TikTok formats in their posts. Stephanie often posts rundowns of her meals when she’s tailing suspects in restaurants or does her skin care routine in her car, noting, “Everyone seems to love it.” In her recent videos, Allen-Stell demonstrates how to sweep a hotel room for hidden cameras and talks about the HydroJug cup she’s "obsessed" with, taking it on stakeouts and flights. Taken as a whole, their channels offer a mix of authority and accessibility—a marked shift from the PIs of old, or at least our collective perception of a PI. Philip Marlowe and Jake Gittes never broadcast from the front seat of their car wearing a Yankee’s hat and under-eye masks, but for Stephanie, it’s her preferred stakeout attire.

This unvarnished relatability has helped Stephanie and Allen-Stell blow up, with both able to make a living from their work. Stephanie charges a minimum retainer of $650 for surveillance cases and says she has built a “comfortable and growing” career, with most of her cases coming via the internet and her Instagram and TikTok pages fueling “major growth.” TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, which is open to accounts with at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 views in a 30-day span, even pays for views, with partnerships across both platforms adding another income stream to her work. Allen-Stell offers background checks from as little as $20, with surveillance costing clients $125 per hour in most cities and slightly more in Los Angeles and San Francisco, due to higher overheads.

For Stephanie, a financially successful business has brought her closer to her dream of building an all-women surveillance team. She says her clients—particularly the ones who found her via Instagram and TikTok—are almost exclusively women are women. “Investigative work includes critical thinking, discretion, patience, and being quick on your feet,” she says. “I’ve found that women tend to blend in more easily during surveillance and often have a sharper eye for detail.”

PI work calls for empathy and emotional intelligence, she adds, “especially since the majority of my clients are women navigating deeply personal situations. Plus, it would be cool to have an all-woman team, especially in a male-dominated industry.”

Based in Queensland, Australia, Cassie Crofts, aka Venus Investigations, is also focused on safety, with a team of investigators offering women background checks on potential dates or flatmates. Marketing herself as “Part detective, part BFF, 100% confidential,” her confessional-style TikToks have racked up over 39,000 likes.

Crofts got into the industry when, over a glass of wine, a friend confided that she thought her partner was cheating. The group wanted to find out more, but the obligatory socials search aside, they didn’t know where to begin. Hiring a traditional “old man in a trench coat” didn’t really feel like an option, so Crofts, a 37-year-old radio journalist, earned her private investigator certificate after months of formal training and classroom time.

While she does offer in-car surveillance like Stephanie, she more often focuses on background data for definitive proof, accessing databases available to PIs. In one case, she traced a man’s supermarket rewards card to a town miles from where he told his wife he would be—a town where his ex-girlfriend happened to live. She also might ask for information around shared bank accounts. Sometimes, it’s even simpler than that. “There was one case where they had access to each other's phones, and I said to check his most frequently used emojis. There was an eggplant there, and he wasn't sending her eggplants,” Crofts says.

Like Stephanie, Crofts says the majority—“80 to 90 percent”—of her client base is made up of women and nonbinary people, and with good reason. Suspecting your partner of infidelity “could be the most heartbreaking, devastating moment of your life,” she says. “The idea of going up to a middle-aged man in a suit and spilling the deepest worries about your relationship and the love of your life is a really hard thing to do, let alone to someone who doesn't feel like they're an empathetic presence. We try to provide that sort of support to people when they're going through this scenario.”

Nicola Fox Hamilton teaches cyberpsychology at Dublin’s Institute of Art, Design and Technology and cohosts the In Bits cyberpsychology podcast. She says safety is one of the reasons these investigations resonate with women. “You have men taking ideas from the manosphere, be it extreme people like Andrew Tate or people who are more benignly misogynistic. Women are aware that there are quite a few men who think this way, and it’s probably increased their fear so they want to know more about men before they meet them, to filter out that stuff and to actually meet a partner who is a decent human being and who values them as an equal.”

But not every case is focused on infidelity. Allen-Stell says that one of her most harrowing cases involved a 17-year-old girl hooked on heroin and being trafficked.

Allen-Stell claims she and the girl’s parents cornered the traffickers at a roadside motel. She says the parents went in and got the girl, and they waited for police. “She was super skinny and vomiting, but I protected her with my life, like she was my kid,” Allen-Stell says.

According to Allen-Stell, the girls’ father then began slashing one of the perp’s tires, causing Allen-Stell to tap out, not wanting to be caught in anything illegal.

Naturally, online audiences want to know how the stories they get so invested in turn out.

Stephanie says her followers often ask, “Can we know what your client did after? Did they leave? Did they stay?”

But, beyond vague details, no good PI will reveal personal information about their clients; protection is paramount. Licensed PIs are protected by law, but amateurs could be putting themselves at risk of harassment or stalking lawsuits by doing so. When Allen-Stell and Stephanie do share videos online, they say it’s always with the client’s approval.

Just one client of the PIs WIRED interviewed wanted to share her experience for this piece, and only briefly. Chloe (not her real name) worked with Allen-Stell when she had concerns over her daughter dating a “significantly” older man.

“I specifically chose a woman for the job, as I felt her insight and intuition would be invaluable in a sensitive situation,” she says, adding that she would recommend Allen-Stell to anyone seeking a PI.

While sleuthing comes with potential pitfalls, the subjects of these investigations can also be at risk. The true-crime audience has a voracious appetite for seeing the guilty party punished, particularly when cheating is involved.

“Some private investigators are sharing way too much,” says Allen-Stell. “I hope they’re not on surveillance showing the person’s actual house. What if a neighbor happened to see? ‘Oh, she’s doing surveillance, so that means this person is cheating?’ I don’t think it’s fair to out people publicly.”

But if the internet wants to know something, it finds a way, as a viral June 2024 video tracking down a man accused of cheating on a domestic US flight proved. The video, posted by a TikTokker who had no connection or background info about the man, detailed the flight number in question and details about the alleged cheater’s family.

In the case of Andy Byron, of Coldplay concert infamy, there are multiple articles asking “who is his wife?” and speculating about his family. As 404 Media writes, the incident is “emblematic of our ​​current private surveillance and social media hellscape,” where TikTok commenters are using face-recognition tools to identify random people online.

“I think shaming is the extension of the algorithmic flow toward extremism,” says Cohen. “The internet normalizes content as it progresses, meaning anything extreme must continue to become more extreme … We're also living through a period of perceived lawlessness, and true-crime investigations and shaming seem like justice, albeit amateur, vigilante justice.”

Writing on Reddit in 2023, user Electronic_Gur_843 appealed for advice after being “blasted publicly on the internet” for a “mistake.”

“It was a traumatic experience that resulted in me being torn down by hundreds of thousands of people. It was on me for making the mistake, but it was also blown out of proportion. I don't want to reveal too much, but I can assure you it was nothing illegal or bad enough to deem me a ’bad person.’ I was just young/naive about the power of the internet and stirred up some drama.”

They say their google results turn up “pages of articles” about them, adding that the whole experience left them “severely depressed.”

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 percent of adolescents have been cyberbullied and 9.5 percent of adolescents have made a serious suicide attempt, as of 2023, meaning that putting a stranger’s business on main can have real, and sometimes devastating, consequences.

“The aim of public shaming is to hold people accountable for their behavior that operates outside of the social norms or is considered to be offensive,” says Fox Hamilton, adding that this is usually done with the aim of creating a society where everyone toes the line. But this mentality also means if something bad happens to someone—like being caught cheating online and having your family messaged by strangers as a result—we’re more likely to victim blame, because we see them as deserving it.

Ironically, Fox Hamilton says that “people who have that belief in a just world are often more likely to publicly shame or jump on the bandwagon with stuff like this, because they think ‘you did a bad thing, it's your fault, and I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens here.’”

There’s also a slippery slope when we start policing people according to our own morals and assumptions. In response to the Coldplay concert scandal, right-wing influencer Matt Walsh wrote on X, “One of my least popular (but still correct) opinions is that adultery should be a criminal offense punishable by serious prison time for both parties involved.” It’s not hard to imagine how that logic could be used to apply to a woman trapped in an abusive marriage or to people who don’t subscribe to monogamy.

When the target is a public figure, like a CEO, audiences can feel even more justified in attacking.

“There are so many issues going on in the world at the moment with big tech companies, and I think to some people Andy Byron represents that in a symbolic way,” says Fox Hamilton.

Whether they’re posting a video recounting a case or posting active surveillance, the PIs interviewed by WIRED all say they are careful to obscure faces and any identifiable landmarks to protect the identities and locations both of the accused and the accusers. In Stephanie’s case, she sometimes goes a step further, reenacting cases for video—a step taken to make sure of her client’s confidentiality. None of their clients or clients partners have been doxed online.

Allen-Stell agrees the public can take things too far—describing the Coldplay show fallout as a “witch hunt.”

“What started out as holding people accountable has turned into the sport of public humiliation,” she says. “It’s reckless. The internet is not a courtroom, and random users are not investigators.”