Would You Employ a Marriage Spy?

Chinese citizens can pay an agency to sabotage their spouse’s extra-marital affair. The agency, known as Weiqing employs agents known as “mistress hunters” to target people who are seeing someone who is already married and gain their trust. Once this trust has been established, the “mistress hunter” aims is to dissuade this person from continuing with the affair.

Various Machiavellian techniques are employed such as the “transference method” where the agent will try to “distract [the] attention” of their subject on to something else. Another technique involves the agent making arrangements so that their target is relocated elsewhere for work. For other agents, this presumably seems like too much work and instead they simply offer to beat up the mistress.  

You may wonder what the point of sabotaging an extra-marital affair would be. Even if you manage to stop the affair, it still doesn’t change the fact that your spouse did do it. Despite this, the agency has proved very popular with 59 offices across China and with 90% of the agency’s clients being women. It remains to be seen however whether such agencies will become popular in other countries in the future.