Most people who call our office about a cheating spouse have already made up their minds. They’ve been sitting on it for weeks, arguing with themselves about whether they’re being paranoid. What they want from an infidelity investigator in Miami is a factual record: dates, times, addresses, a plate number, video.
The hard part is knowing when a suspicion has enough shape to be worth paying someone to investigate. Some red flags give us something to work with. Others are just painful. Here’s how I sort them, and what happens after you make the call.
The Marital Infidelity Signs That Actually Turn Into Evidence
The signs worth acting on are the ones tied to a repeatable window of time. A partner who leaves at the same hour every Thursday and comes home with a new explanation gives an investigator something to plan around. Phone secrecy on its own, however awful it feels, produces nothing we can lawfully document.
These are the ones clients bring us most often:
- A schedule that shifted and then stayed shifted. New gym hours, a standing Tuesday client dinner, Saturday errands that somehow take four hours.
- Mileage or gas spending that doesn’t square with where they said they went.
- Phone habits. Face-down on the counter, screen tilted away, a new passcode, notifications switched off.
- Cash withdrawals in $200 and $300 increments, or Zelle transfers to a name you don’t recognize.
- Hotel or rideshare charges inside the county you both live in.
- Grooming that spikes on specific days of the week.
- They start accusing you.
- A friend of theirs who used to answer your questions and now gets vague.
Of that list, the schedule change is the one I care about. Everything else is context. Surveillance runs on patterns, meaning a window of time, a vehicle, and a rough idea of where the subject is going. When someone tells me “he leaves around six on Wednesdays and isn’t back until after eleven,” we can build a plan. When someone tells me the hours are all over the place and nothing repeats, I say that out loud before anybody signs anything.
One more thing about phones. I understand why that’s the first place people look. But the phone is usually the least useful part of a case, because everything sitting behind that passcode is legally off limits to both of us. The useful evidence is outside, in public, where a camera can see it. That’s the part an infidelity investigator in Miami can lawfully document.
When Suspicion Is Worth Hiring an Infidelity Investigator in Miami
Hire an investigator when you can name a recurring window of time and identify the vehicle. If you can also describe the general area where the activity happens, we can usually get you an answer in one to three sessions. Without a window, you’re paying for guesswork.
Two other moments make the timing right. The first is when you’re about to do something you can’t easily undo: file for divorce, sign a mortgage, move to another state, have another child. The second is when you’ve already filed and your attorney has asked for documentation to support an alimony or asset claim.
Nobody in this business should quote you a flat price for a case they haven’t heard yet. Infidelity surveillance in South Florida is billed by the hour with a minimum block per session, plus mileage, and the honest range depends entirely on how many nights it takes and how far the subject travels. What I will commit to is this: after the first session, we tell you whether more surveillance is likely to produce anything, even when the answer costs us the next invoice.
And some cases close with a report saying the subject drove to the office, stayed four hours, and drove home. That’s a real outcome. A client told me last year it was the best money she’d ever spent on something she didn’t want to buy.
What Cheating Spouse Surveillance Looks Like in the Field
Cheating spouse surveillance starts with a confidential intake, then pre-surveillance research to confirm the vehicle, the plate, and the addresses tied to the subject. An investigator sets up during the windows you identified and documents what happens with timestamped covert video evidence. You get the footage and a written report with a timeline.
South Florida makes this harder than most markets, and any investigator who tells you otherwise hasn’t worked here long.
Brickell and downtown are full of valet-only garages, so the subject’s car vanishes into a structure nobody can follow it into. The condo towers along Biscayne have key-fob elevators and no public sightline to a unit door. Guardhouses in Coral Gables, Pinecrest, and Weston will stop a car and log the plate. And one wrong guess at a causeway or an 836 exit can cost you the subject for the whole night.
That’s why the desk work matters more here than the part people picture. Before anyone sits in a car, we verify the plate, the second vehicle, the registered addresses, and the layout of wherever the subject is heading. Choosing the wrong spot outside a Coconut Grove restaurant with two exits is how a case gets burned, and a burned surveillance is worse than none at all because the subject changes behavior afterward.
On the legal side, covert video evidence in Florida means video without audio, shot from locations where the subject has no reasonable expectation of privacy. Parking lots, restaurant patios, hotel entrances, public sidewalks. We don’t shoot through bedroom windows and we don’t step onto private property to get an angle. Footage that gets excluded is worse than no footage, because it hands the other side a story about you instead.
The DIY Mistakes That Can Sink Your Case and Get You Charged
Recording a spouse’s phone calls, installing spyware on their laptop, or getting into their email without permission can be a crime in Florida. Under Florida Statute 934.03, every party to a private conversation has to consent before it’s recorded. Evidence gathered that way usually gets excluded, and it can expose you to criminal liability.
Look at O’Brien v. O’Brien, a 2005 decision out of Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal. A wife installed spyware on the family computer and captured her husband’s instant-message conversations with another woman while he played online games. The trial court refused to let her use any of it. The appellate court agreed, treating the captured chats as an illegal interception under Florida’s wiretap statute. She had the proof in hand and couldn’t use a word of it.
Trackers are their own trap. In 2023 Florida added Statute 934.425, making it a crime to place a tracking device or tracking app on another person’s property without consent. The exceptions are narrow, and joint ownership of the car is not the clean safe harbor people assume. Ask your divorce attorney before you buy an AirTag, not after.
Getting into a spouse’s phone or iCloud without authorization can also run into Florida’s computer crimes statutes and the federal Stored Communications Act. If the other side’s lawyer can point at illegal snooping, the affair stops being the story and you become the story.
How Adultery Affects a Florida Divorce
Florida is a no-fault state, so you don’t have to prove adultery to end a marriage. Statute 61.052 asks only that the marriage be irretrievably broken. Adultery still carries weight in three places: alimony, division of assets, and time-sharing, though the last one is narrower than most people expect.
That first part surprises clients who assume a judge will punish a cheating spouse on principle. No fault has to be proven, and none gets assigned.
Money is where documentation earns its keep. Statute 61.08 lets the court consider the adultery of either spouse, and the circumstances around it, in setting the amount of alimony. If marital funds paid for hotels, flights, rent on a second apartment, or gifts, that can support an unequal split under Statute 61.075 as dissipation of marital assets. Bank records show the spending. Surveillance and an asset and lifestyle investigation show who the money was spent on and when.
Time-sharing works differently. Under Statute 61.13, a judge weighs moral fitness among the best-interest factors, but the conduct has to actually touch the children. An affair the kids knew nothing about rarely shifts a custody decision. Children left alone in a condo while a parent is across town is a different conversation, and it’s exactly the kind of thing surveillance documents.
I’m an investigator, not an attorney, and what any of this does for your specific case belongs to your family lawyer. Matrimonial investigations go best when the lawyer and the investigator talk before the first surveillance session rather than after it.
Hiring an Infidelity Investigator in Miami: What to Check First
Ask for the agency license number and confirm the person doing the fieldwork holds a Class “C” investigator license. Both are issued by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services under Chapter 493. Then ask who actually sits in the car, what the report contains, and whether that person will testify.
Five questions worth asking on the first call:
- What’s your agency license number, and who holds the Class “C” license on my case?
- Am I hiring you, or are you subcontracting this to someone I’ll never meet?
- What does the deliverable include? Raw footage, or a summary?
- Will you sign an affidavit and sit for a deposition if my attorney needs it?
- After session one, will you tell me if more surveillance is a waste of money?
Proximity matters more than people expect. A Coral Gables private investigator who already knows which corner of a Publix lot gives a clean sightline on a restaurant entrance sets up faster than someone driving down from Palm Beach for the first time.
One answer should end the call. Any investigator who offers to get into your spouse’s phone, pull their texts, or clone their iCloud is offering to commit a crime and make you a party to it. Licensed Florida investigators don’t do that work. The ones advertising it are either lying about what they can do or telling you the truth about their ethics.
We’ve been running infidelity investigations and covert surveillance for South Florida clients since 1985, out of our office in Coral Gables and across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Call (305) 278-8700 for a confidential, no-obligation conversation, and I’ll tell you honestly whether hiring an infidelity investigator in Miami is likely to get you the answer you need.
Travis Wasser is a licensed Florida investigator and the owner of Wasser Investigations Inc., Florida Agency #A3200002. He is a summa cum laude criminal justice graduate of Florida International University, a member of the Florida Association of Licensed Investigators, and the second generation to run the agency his father founded in 1985.