Total strangers pay Trinity to catch their partners cheating

The text chain started innocently enough with a “Hey! How have you been?” from TikTok user Trinity, better known as @trinitykayh. 
Just a few messages later, an eight-month relationship was in ruins; but the man Trinity was texting had no idea their chat was a set-up, or that it would be shared with over 2.2 million people online.
Watch the video above.
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He was the latest of a string of men whose girlfriends had paid Trinity $US70 (approx. $106) to “test” how loyal they were to the relationship by flirting over text or social media DMs using details provided by the girlfriends.
And Trinity’s not the only one making bank off of these ‘loyalty tests’, the results of which she shares on TikTok to her over 580,000 followers.
It’s just the latest iteration of the trend of trying to ‘expose’ cheaters online, and now content creators like Trinity are making money from it.
She works through Lazo, a platform that allows anyone to pay for a loyalty test from ‘checkers’ who will contact the user’s partner and report back.
Alex Hasroyan, co-founder and COO of Lazo, tells 9honey the platform was born from the “doubts and uncertainties” many young people experience about their partner’s fidelity, “often due to the ease with which one can connect with others online”.
Lazo gives those in doubt the tools to test their partner’s loyalty with less risk of being caught than if they had a friend or acquaintance reach out on their behalf.
“Our tests are designed to observe behaviour rather than entrap individuals,” he adds.
“Checkers aim to create scenarios that reflect real-life interactions to see if the partner will act inappropriately. It’s important to note that the intent is not to trick but to verify genuine suspicions.”
According to Hasroyan, those suspicions are often well-founded; he reports that 40 per cent of people “fail” these loyalty tests, just like the man in Trinity’s video did.
She reached out to the unidentified man claiming to be an old Tinder match and suggested they meet up, which he agreed to.
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Trinity then asked if he had a girlfriend, to which the man responded, “Nope I’m single.”
“And that was enough for the girlfriend,” Trinity said in her video, “so then I blocked him.”
In that single exchange, the girlfriend got evidence that her boyfriend wasn’t entirely faithful, Trinity got US$49 (approx. $74 AUD) after Lazo took its 30 per cent fee, and the boyfriend got … well, probably dumped.
Hasroyan insists that the men who are tested by Lazo’s checkers aren’t entrapped, but it’s hard to imagine he felt good about the fact that his girlfriend had paid for the test (if he ever learned the truth, that is).
“Most checkers have been cheated on in the past and are here to make sure other girls don’t have to go through the same extremely painful experience of finding out you are being cheated on,” Hasroyan insists.
“All of them agree that loyalty tests are way more ethical than snooping and that knowing about loyalty tests would have saved them from suffering.”
But of course they’d say that if they stand to make hundreds of dollars from performing these loyalty tests and then sharing them on social media, where they may earn more cash from monetisation programs.
And loyalty tests aren’t the only way supposed cheaters are being exposed online.
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There’s a trend of social media users filming strangers in public when they suspect the person – usually a man – is cheating, then posting it to TikTok with calls to action like “find his girlfriend/wife” and “she deserves to know the truth”.
The videos often go viral, but Digital Sociologist Julie Albright tells 9honey they do little to actually discourage cheating because “no one ever thinks something like being found out this way could happen to them.”
Not to mention the fact that what viewers see in a 30-second video is rarely the whole story.
The ‘cheater’ may not be cheating at all, the interaction could be totally innocent, and filming and sharing it could cause massive personal and professional issues for the people involved.
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“Publicly embarrassing someone in this manner, ‘calling them out’ in restaurants or other places, could have unintended consequences from rage of the partner, to even being fired from a job,” Albright explains.
And just like with Howard’s loyalty tests, the subjects of these videos usually don’t even know they’re being filmed until it’s far too late.
“We’ve become a surveillance society now, where cameras are everywhere. This is just one more camera capturing our behaviours,” Albright says. 
While the viral clips might seem entertaining, it’s important to remember that the subjects are real people with entire lives the audience (and the person filming) has no idea about.
The same goes for the people who ‘fail’ loyalty tests and have the results shared online.
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Paying for a loyalty test may help some people tackle their doubts about a relationship, but will it and other trends around exposing cheaters actually help us have healthier, more trusting relationships? Albright is doubtful.
“People already second-guess their relationships because of the penthouse of attractive, available potential mates on dating apps and social media,” she says.
“Now is a very difficult time particularly for young people to be in relationships [and] cheating videos may give the relationship-cynical even more reason to stay single.”
9honey has reached out to Trinity for comment.
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