You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, the famous saying goes, and apparently it also applies to the dating world.
Honeypotting is the new way both women and men are finding out if their partners are faithful or leading them astray.
And now a Brisbane private investigator known as Miss Honey Potter is revealing her tactics for catching lying spouses in their tracks.
Miss Honey Potter claims she never hits on her targets, but rather sees if they take the bait that she waves in front of their face.
‘Honeypotting is definitely not about trying to purposefully catch these guys out,’ she told 97.3FM’s Bianca, Terry and Bob. ‘We don’t go engaging them in conversation and hitting on them. It’s not my job to hit on them, it’s my job to go in there and see if they will hit on me.’
Miss Honey Potter revealed that her business received a huge spike after the Ashley Madison scandal.
The Ashley Madison website was hacked by cyber criminals who stole a trove of information including names, addresses, credit card details, email addresses and explicit messages, and threatened to publish them online unless the website was closed.
They later made good on their threat, releasing an avalanche of information about Ashley Madison’s users that ended marriages around the world.
‘There were a lot of women who started to question the behaviours of their partners and their movements,’ Miss Honey Potter said.
But she revealed that it was both men and women who sought out her services in the hopes of receiving some reassurance that their ‘partners are doing right by them’.
‘Unfortunately, there are many people out there who are not,’ she added.
Miss Honey Potter mentioned one recent job in particular where her client’s partner was flexing his flirtatious muscle at the gym.
‘It’s definitely something that this woman needs to be concerned about,’ she said.
‘His flirtatious nature, not only with me but in his environment, is certainly not suggestive of him being in a permanent relationship with anybody.’
But Miss Honey Potter said she’s worked a number of jobs that had happy endings.
‘There’s a lot of jobs where I am able to go back to the woman and give them reassurance and say, “Look, you have someone very nice to me, he brought up in conversation [his] wife and children’”.
‘Those guys, I feel like my job is a good thing because I can give those women reassurance they have good men in their life.’
So what leads women or men to resort to honeypotting in the first place? Miss Honey Potter said they often saw the same first three signs something was amiss.
‘Number one is the mobile phone,’ she said. ‘If the man is turning away from you and not letting his partner look at the phone or deleting things.’
Miss Honey Potter said the second sign is often when a partner gets caught in a lie about where they had been or where they were heading.
And the third, she said, was just ‘the vibe’.
‘You can tell when someone is spending longer hours at work, that’s definitely an indicator.’
‘When they’re not coming home from things on time.’
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