If you are leaving an emotional, abusive or contentious marriage, your spouse may take to spying on you or even stalking you to gain the upper hand or to control you. If your spouse is successful, this could put you at a significant disadvantage during the process of getting your divorce in New York.

Below are some of the top ways your soon-to-be-ex-spouse might surveil you during or after your Long Island, NY divorce and how you can get help from a experienced New York family and divorce lawyer.

Watching You In Person

The most common way an ex will surveil their spouse during a divorce is by watching you in person. They may frequent your place of employment if you work in the public sector, or they may drive by your home at any or all hours of the day or night in hopes of seeing you outside or seeing your vehicle parked in the driveway. Your ex-spouse may also do this if they want to frighten you or make you believe that you are always being watched.

Or, your ex may frequent places they know you are likely to be, such as the post office, grocery store, your favorite gym or restaurant, or other places that you often go, especially if you normally go there alone.

Electronic Surveillance

Electronic surveillance is also fairly common, especially when the suspicious ex is adept at technology. Your ex may do any one or more of the following in an attempt to track your online activity:

• Wiretapping
• Bugging
• Videotaping
• Geolocation targeting
• Keylogging
• Email tracking

It’s pretty common knowledge that as soon as you suspect you may be headed toward divorce proceedings that you should set up your own banking accounts for your personal assets, But there’s more to it than that if you want to ensure that your ex can’t track your whereabouts and activities. One of the most dangerous tools your ex may have access to is your cell phone. Be sure to remove any geolocation tracking on your phone and reset it or better yet, get off any shared cell phone plans and get a new phone your ex has no access to.

Other electronic subscriptions can also provide your ex with inappropriate access to your activities. Be sure that you cancel your existing email accounts your ex may know your username and password to and set up new email accounts your to which your ex has no access.

Consider any shared “cloud” accounts like iCloud or Google Drive as well and cancel and set up new ones.

Through Shared Accounts

If you share subscription accounts with your ex-spouse like Netflix or Amazon, they could use these to track what you’re watching or purchasing. They can go into your account history and review recent activity, which could even be dangerous for you in situations where you do not want your ex-spouse to know your location or other private information.

Stalking Your Social Media Profiles

Even if you block your ex on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, they may still be able to access some public portions of your accounts or may be able to use a mutual friend’s account to access your full profile. Do you suspect they may even know your logins? If you can’t cancel the accounts and set up new ones, at least be sure to change to change your passwords to something your ex would never consider.

Your ex may try to pull evidence from your posts to suggest that you may be ineligible for alimony or that you’re an unfit parent so that you may be denied child custody and/or visitation.

Through a Shared Friend

If you share a friend with your ex whom you visit in person, you may be at risk of your friend giving your ex information about you, even if you trust this friend. Your ex may ask seemingly innocuous questions that your friend doesn’t think are harmful but gives your ex more control over you or the divorce process.

Or, your ex may put your friend in a difficult position where they feel as though they will lose your ex as a friend if they refuse to give them information about you. If your friend considers your ex a better companion, they may promise you that they will not divulge any information to your ex regardless of whether or not your ex asks, but then tells your ex everything anyway. You may not know that your friend has betrayed you until it is too late.

With a Private Investigator

If your ex has significant financial resources, or has access to family members that do, they may be able to hire a private investigator (PI) to find you and report your activity back to your ex. They may hire a PI if they believe you may be hiding assets, cheating, or engaging in other lawful activity that could give them an advantage during divorce litigation. They may also ask the investigator to surveil your children if you have them in an effort to find evidence that you are unfit to have custody or visitation.

When To Call an Experienced Long Island Divorce Attorney

Spouses have even been known to resort to very illegal activities like putting tracking devices on your car or video or audiotaping you when you least expect it. If you suspect or even have concrete evidence your spouse or ex-spouse may have tapped your phone, paid someone to watch you, or is stalking you in places you frequent, it’s critical that you contact an experienced Long Island divorce lawyer as soon as possible. Contact Hornberger Verbitsky, P.C. today by dialing 631-923-1910 or fill out the short form on this page.