How to Keep Your Spouse from Knowing You are Considering Divorce

Considering divorce, but don’t want your spouse to know?  Afraid that if he finds out, he will start spying on you by accessing your cell phone and computer?  With our digital lives so easily exposed, how do you protect your personal privacy?  

If you want to attend my webinars without your spouse knowing, the quickest way to achieve privacy is to ask a trusted family or friend to purchase the webinar with their own credit card and email information. Then go to your friend’s house to use their computer to attend the webinar and view the products. 

But attending my webinars is just one of many things you will want to do when secretly planning for a divorce. Depending on your circumstances, you will probably have a need to do the following, for example: 

• Communicating and paying financial professionals (accountant, financial advisor, etc.);
• Communicating and paying legal professionals (divorce attorneys and consultants);
• Purchasing divorce resources online such as e-books, webinars, online courses, coaching and consulting;
• Researching divorce online.

For researching divorce online, you can always go to a public library, or use a computer of a trusted friend or family member.  Otherwise, there are three items you will need to purchase — sooner than later —  to really get started in earnest: a burner phone, a burner email address, and a prepaid credit card. You will purchase these items with cash — to maintain your anonymity, all explained below.

USE A SECRET BURNER PHONE 

A burner phone is a cheap mobile phone that you can buy over the counter at a major retail outlet, grocery store or even a gas station. You prepay for it with cash or a prepaid credit card, and it is contract-free. You can dispose of it when you don’t need it any longer. It comes with its own temporary cell phone number, that’s unattached to your name. Because it is difficult to track the phone’s usage, you stay anonymous, whereas a contract-bound cell phone requires a lot of information about you, and leaves a paper trail back to you. (It gets its name “burner” because you can easily dispose of it, without a trace.) 

A burner phone is your own secret phone. With a burner phone, your interactions are generally confidential. You can make calls, receive/send texts and download applications (apps) without your spouse knowing. You can attend KarenWinner’s Brilliant Divorce Series ™ on-line Zoom seminars, without your spouse finding out.

Without a burner phone, your spouse can easily look through your texts, your web browser search history, etc., and monitor your activities. You could be discovered in ways you don’t even expect. For example, if you view YouTube videos about divorce when logged in to a Google/YouTube account on your regular tablet or computer, YouTube might show videos about divorce in suggested videos for you that will be displayed. If your regular cell phone,  computers  and internet service are on a family plan, then the data is stored in a cloud that your spouse can access — to see every transaction you make. If you have Bluetooth or wifi turned on, you can be easily tracked.

The burner phone also comes with a prepaid SIM card — that connects you to the cell service. It’s ready to activate when you buy it. 

It is very important to remember to purchase the burner phone in cash or with a prepaid credit card (explained below) so you don’t need any personal identification to activate it. Using cash, or a prepaid credit card, you don’t have to give any personal information to obtain it.

If you activate the burner phone with wi-fi, make sure you do it at a public place and not at home, because that can be traced to you.  Rather than wi-fi, it might be better to use cell phone service that comes with the data plan on the Sim card. 

You are buying the burner phone for the specific reason of maintaining your privacy especially when you are considering divorce.

 You don’t want your spouse to know about the burner phone so make sure not to buy the burner phone online, because then you would need to provide information about you, and  the purchase would be displayed and recorded and tracked on the computer, through email, etc. and it would defeat the purpose of your maintaining your privacy.

When you use a burner phone, the phone number does go through a cell phone network so it is not completely anonymous. Law enforcement can obtain the logs of numbers called, so if you are married to a cop or other law enforcer, keep this in mind. The best way to protect yourself is to not let him find out about the burner phone to begin with. 

USE A SECRET EMAIL ADDRESS

With your burner phone, you will also need a secret email address — a disposable email address. The reason is that most online purchases including my products will require sending receipts to an email address. You want to be able to send emails from your burner email address, and to receive them, without it being traced to your personal email address, and you can do this at Burner Mail.  You can even generate a particular burner email address to use with a particular website. You can reply to emails using a burner email address. The recipient won’t know your personal e-mail address. 

USE A PREPAID CREDIT CARD

How do you purchase a secret burner phone and secret email address without it being traced back to you? The answer is simple: pay for the phone with cash or as an alternative, use a prepaid credit card to purchase it. Prepaid credit cards do not create a record of your transactions so they are useful for protecting your privacy. 

Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover all carry prepaid credit cards. You can purchase them at retail outlets, grocery stores, banks, credit unions. Just remember to pay in cash — and not with any credit card to avoid a creating a record of the transaction. 

Prepaid credit cards work like credit cards only they come with an available balance of funds that you prepay for, or they have an option to load money onto the card. Unlike a credit card, you are not borrowing money. The prepaid cards are not linked to any bank account. There’s no monthly statement. And when you pay in cash, you don’t have to give private information about yourself to obtain it. 

When you use a prepaid card, you’re only using the money that you’ve loaded onto it. You use the card until you’ve depleted the balance of funds. Once the money runs out, you won’t be able to make more purchases until you reload the card. You can use a prepaid credit card the way you would with a conventional credit card —  you can swipe it or insert it into point-of-sale systems to make your purchases and, in some cases, use it at ATMs for cash withdrawals.  Because you are using a prepaid credit card, the purchases will not be traced back to you. 

Be careful of added fees that might be associated with certain actions. “You may be charged fees of varying amounts for several reasons, like making transactions,” according to Capital One. 

Also you need to make sure that any payment information you receive about fees is sent to your secret email on your burner phone  and no other email or on-line account you hold — so as not to be traced.                    

OTHER TIPS FOR NOT GETTING FOUND OUT

When you are not using your secret burner phone, turn it off, so it does not make any noises. Remember to keep your ringer off too. If you think your spouse might discover the phone in your coat or purse, consider hiding it somewhere where it would not be found — maybe in one of your shoes in the closet or in the back of a drawer filled with junk that your spouse would not bother to rummage through. If your husband has cameras all over the house, make sure to evade them when hiding your burner phone. 

When using your burner phone, don’t carry other cell phones or tablets with you to avoid being tracked. Even on a burner phone browser or someone else’s device, make sure you are not logged in to any shared accounts that your spouse can access, while you are using the internet for divorce-related things. For example, Google/Chrome, Apple/Safari, YouTube, Facebook, etc. might save your browsing history.

While going through all this effort to maintain privacy, don’t forget to change your passwords on all of your other devices — tablet, personal cell phone, computer. Make sure the new passwords are secure and unknown by your spouse for email accounts, social media accounts, computer and phone-lock screens. 

REMEMBER TO DISCARD THE BURNER PHONE 

AT THE RIGHT TIME

Using a secret burner phone, a secret email address and prepaid credit card provides the privacy you need to consider your options for divorce without the fear that your spouse will be spying on you. Understand, however, that you will be maintaining secrecy only temporarily. Be aware that once a divorce battle begins in the court, using a burner phone to conceal financial activities can be held against you by a judge. Financial dishonesty may carry negative legal repercussions for you. As long as you discard your burner phone by the time the divorce starts, you won’t have to worry.  

So how do you know when the official divorce battle begins?  It starts when the first person —  whether it is you or your spouse—  purchases an index number in divorce court which opens your “case.” This “commencement” date triggers the divorce process, and as the process unfolds you and your spouse will  be legally required to disclose all of your financial dealings to each other. Regardless of where you live, all known financial information is privy to disclosure, pending a settlement or divorce. 

YOUR LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS

If the thought of maintaining temporary secrecy while you consider your options gives you the creeps, then it might mean you are having trouble adjusting to an attitude of independence from your spouse that is necessary to survive the treacherous  journey through divorce court (explained in my nationally-acclaimed book, Divorced From Justice: The Abuse of Women b Divorce Lawyers and Judges  (Reganbooks/Harper Collins). Or maybe you don’t want any secrets between you and your spouse. Only you can know. If you are wondering to yourself: Why is all this secrecy so important anyway? It’s important for this reason: If you truly believe you are headed for a contested divorce (meaning your spouse does not consent to fair terms or a fair child custody arrangement, and you foresee a fight over child custody or marital assets and property  — particularly when you have been coercively controlled or are married to a narcissist)  then you will be glad you secretly prepared for this fight beforehand. The system is literally structured to foster an adversarial fight between spouses. Better to front-load your education beforehand and gear up resourcefully, rather than be drop-kicked into an amoral arena where you can be mercilessly dragged through the mud by your estranged spouse and his attorney. Enter at your own risk — knowing that preparation is key to survival.