iMessages can be connected to other devices (Picture: Getty)
A man is preparing to sue Apple for more than £5 million after ‘deleted messages’ he sent to sex workers were discovered by his wife.
The unfaithful husband claims that Apple’s lack of transparency over deleted messages has led to his wife filing for divorce.
Richard, not his real name, is reportedly a middle aged man from England, and revealed to The Times that he had turned to sex workers in the final years of his marriage. He would contact them via the iMessages app on his iPhone before deleting the incriminating texts.
However, when his wife went on the family iMac, the messages, going back several years, popped up despite him believing he had deleted them.
She filed for divorce within a month.
He told The Times: ‘If you are told a message is deleted, you are entitled to believe it’s deleted.
‘It’s all quite painful and quite raw still. It was a very brutal way of finding out [for my wife]. My thoughts are, if I had been able to talk to her rationally and she had not had such a brutal realisation of it, I might still be married.’
Richard’s wife found years of messages despite them being deleted on his phone (Picture: Getty)
Richard said that the couple had been ‘very happily married’ for more than 20 years, and that a ‘superb marriage’ had been ‘thrown away or something which many men do, and some women do, but mainly men’.
He said: ‘Talking to some of my friends, some of them have had affairs – which I consider a much greater breach of trust – and still stayed married after they had been revealed.
‘I think there would have been a way through it if the realisation hadn’t been so sudden and brutal and upsetting.’
Richard is now pursuing legal action against the tech giant for the more than £5 million he lost in his divorce and through legal costs, claiming that the company does not make it clear that deleted messages can appear on other Apple devices, even after being deleted on the phone.
As well as the financial loss, Richard said the effect on his health had been dramatic.
‘I was on really strong beta blockers to try to reduce my panic attacks,’ he said.
‘I genuinely thought I was going to have a heart attack. Divorce is an extraordinarily stressful process and you have children and family dynamics. In my opinion it’s all because Apple told me my messages were deleted when they weren’t.
‘If the message had said, “These messages are deleted on this device”, that would have been a clue, or “These messages are deleted on this device only” that would have been even better.’
His wife discovered the messages on their family iMac (Picture: Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty)
Richard is being represented by London law firm Rosenblatt, and is looking to establish a class action lawsuit on a no-win, no-fee basis.
Simon Walton, from Rosenblatt, said: ‘Apple had not been clear with users as to what happens to messages they send and receive and, importantly, delete.
‘In many cases, the iPhone informs the user that messages have been deleted but, as we have seen, that isn’t true and is misleading because they are still found on other linked devices – something Apple doesn’t tell its users.’
Metro.co.uk has reached out to Apple for a comment.