Many observer of marital politics knows that dishonesty is the fuse that ignites scores of divorces. Hidden lovers, hidden addictions, hidden pasts – all contribute mightily to today’s divorce culture in monumental ways.

But once you flip over the rock and shed light on some of these vices, the real hiding begins. That’s when a spouse, fearful of a divorce court’s retribution, may begin hiding financial assets that only again see the light of day well after the spouses have parted and the lawyers have left the building.

That’s when the real pain can begin. Tens of thousands of dollars in hidden credit card debts, decimated bank accounts, and/or squandered investment portfolios are only a few of the horrors that have befallen unwary spouses who didn’t keep an eye on the books during their marriage years.  

“Hiding assets is not that uncommon,” says Byron Moldo, a founding partner at the Los Angeles law firm Moldo, Davidson, Frailio, Seror & Sestanovich. “Often, to get the financial records you need, you have to hire a private detective to literally trace the ex-spouse and see where they go and how they spend their money. People tend to get very secretive when they start thinking about divorce. But if you can manage to pry credit card receipts and phone bills out of them, you’re on the right track.”

So where to start? Robert Fitzgerald, a divorce investigator with The Lorenzi Group, a Boston-based security and investigations firm, says when it comes to finding out what money your ex-spouse does or doesn’t have, there are quite a few things to think about first.”  “You really have to be careful about doing things right,” Fitzgerald says. “For example, we recently had a guy who wanted to investigate his wife's work laptop. But that's illegal -- the employer owns the computer, not the wife. We can look at a home computer but not an employer’s computer. We could have faced criminal charges, but clients don’t want to hear that.”  What information – legal, of course – should you focus on? “It’s like filling in pieces of a puzzle,” adds Fitzgerald.

“What e-mail addresses does the spouse have? Typically, that means work or home address at, for example, AOL.com or Verizon.net. What's really important is the sum of all the parts. You can never fill in every single answer. It may just come down to what kinds of credit card statements do you see coming through the house. Some spouses I see don't even realize there is another credit card or another email address. Every case is different.”

Fitzgerald also spends a lot of his time checking web histories and seeing where spouses went in cyberspace. “That’s actually very easy to do. We use web tracking software to see where spouses went, as well.”