Wondering What’s in Your Spouse’s Email? You’d Better Read This First

Thanks to Scott Bucci of Bucci & Dix for this heads up!

Thinking of hacking into your spouse’s email account?

DON’T!

If you begin to suspect your spouse of cheating, I bet one of the first places you think to look would be his or her email account.  So you log on to the family computer, and pull up their gmail or yahoo account, but it’s password protected.  Your spouse never was very creative, so after a few tries you are able to figure out the password.  You log in, and sure enough, find the smoking gun emails sent to your spouse’s paramour.  You think “I got him!”  It’s the family computer that everyone shares, so you’re allowed to do that, right?

 Wrong.

STOP! Call Bucci & Dix first!

Under Virginia law it is a crime to intentionally intercept email communications.  Even if it’s on the family computer.  Even if you are able to hack into your spouse’s account pretty easily.  In addition, your spouse can actually sue you for damages for hacking into his account!  A Virginia statute allows for any person whose email is hacked to sue the hacker and recover:

• actual damages but not less than $400 per day for each day of the violation or $4,000;
• punitive damages; and
• attorney’s fees and litigation costs.

But probably the biggest penalty is that the judge will almost certainly exclude whatever emails you find.  So that smoking gun email you find will never be considered by the judge in your subsequent divorce proceeding.

So how can you find out about those emails?  Many times the only way is through litigation.  Lawyers have a variety of discovery tools we can use to obtain the emails.  These include:

•  requests for production to the spouse for the emails
• requesting the court to order that the spouse make his computer available to be examined by a forensic computer expert (who can search for those deleted and encrypted emails); and
• subpoenas to the spouse’s and paramours employers for any and all emails between them.

So be careful!  If you’ve gotten to the point where you are thinking of hacking into your spouse’s email:

1.    don’t do it, and

2.    it’s probably time to talk to a lawyer about your options

If you need legal advice, contact Bucci and Dix. It’s a call that could end up saving you lots of money, embarrassment, and frustration in the end.

Bucci and Dix are paid advertisers on Richmondmom.com

RhondaDay

Rhonda Day is a wife, mother and grandmother. She enjoys a full-time freelance career as a Writer, Editor, and Marketing Consultant. In addition to Richmondmom.com, she also writes for a variety of local and national websites, and is a ghost-writer for clients.

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