IT’S the trend taking over TikTok – a generation of modern day ‘honey trappers’ offering to slide into your partner’s DMs to check if they’re faithful.
With more than 2,000 new views of “loyalty test” posts every minute on the video app, it’s fast becoming a potentially lucrative market.
One of the first British TikTokers to get in on the act was 19-year-old Liv Shelby who tells the Sun she receives “hundreds of messages a week” from women begging her to carry out tests on their boyfriends.
And while Liv doesn’t charge a fee for her services, many others out there are – and are making up “£1,400 a week”.
But are they offering a valuable service or just exploiting people to make money?
Now a new documentary, Untold: Cheat Detectives, fronted by Kiss FM Breakfast show host Daisy Maskell, is set to investigate the social media phenomenon.
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Speaking in the All 4 film, Daisy said: “There are people out there earning £1,400 a week.
“A lot of honey trappers, like Liv, don’t charge their clients at all but do it for the content.
“If they’re signed to TikTok’s creator’s fund they’ll get about £30 per million views but the real goal is to get enough followers to be seen as an influencer.
“Top influencers can literally be paid over a million pounds for a single sponsored post.”
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Liv, from Manchester, started offering loyalty tests last year. She said: “A video came up on my timeline. It was a girl in America that had done one.
“I just thought it would be fun.”
Car fan Liv, who has 150k followers on TikTok, often posts sexy videos of her in her motor – and can get paid up to £2,000 for a sponsored post by car brands.
The social media manager says she only agrees to try to entrap men on the condition she can post the result to TikTok – with names and pictures obscured to protect their identities.
She will then send a message to a guy, often cheekily asking for his snapchat or phone number – before telling their partner the result and posting the video on TikTok.
Some of her most popular “loyalty test” videos have been watched more than two million times.
'Some men don't think with their brains'
It’s hard to imagine any man could resist petite and pretty Liv when she slides into their DMs – and they often can’t.
When asked if he had a girlfriend, one target immediately replied: ‘No’.
Liv says: “Some men don’t think with their brains. They don’t think they will get caught out.
“I think if it was face to face they wouldn’t do it. But they think they can just delete the conversation.
“I feel awful for the girls. Personally I’d like to know if it were me.”
And she reveals one man was even sending her messages while sitting next to his girlfriend.
Liv, who is “technically single” and has a ‘trust no one’ tattoo on her arm which she got after one bad breakup, says: “He was asking me to come for a night out with him and his friends.
“I was letting her know what was being said. She was gutted. She sent me a message saying, ‘I’m leaving him now’.
“Then a week later she took him back and asked me to take the video down.
“A lot of people ask me to do it and when they don’t get the result they want.
“I always make them aware beforehand that I make the videos for TikTok and entertainment purposes.”
In one video that went viral, Liv says her target bombarded her with messages.
She recalls: “He kept sending me pictures to get me to answer him. I was ignoring him because I’d got the evidence that he’d failed the test.”
Once the test is complete, she “always blocks them”.
While many wouldn’t consider it cheating, Liv says simply replying is a fail in her eyes.
Speaking in the documentary, she says: You don’t answer if you’re going to be loyal. If they say hey they’re half way there.
"Or some say ‘no, sorry, I have a girlfriend’ but, to me, that’s not good enough.
“Some will even go and like my pictures back, then that’s when you know, ‘I’ve got you there.”
'That girl's trapped you'
Some fall for the bait, only to be tipped off by a friend who has seen her videos.
Liv says: “I’ve had a few who have fallen for it then they’ve realised. Their friends tell him, ‘that girl’s trapped you’.
“They tell their girlfriends they knew and were just going along with it.”
And it’s not just men who are put to the test.
Liv says: “There’s a boy from Manchester who has started doing girls.”
The film, part of a new current affairs strand called Untold aimed at younger viewers, also hears from a young woman who was the target of one of these so-called “loyalty tests”.
Rhona, whose name has been changed, passed, but it still killed her relationship.
Speaking in the documentary, she said: “I got a friend request…had a bit of a picture perfect profile, a lad with a cap on and shirtless in it.
"It wasn’t straight to being really flirty, really sexual or anything like that. And that steady flirting of compliments like, ‘you’re really beautiful and pretty.’
“But then it got more flirty, more persistent. I very quickly said, ‘I do have a boyfriend so this isn’t appropriate. I’m not interested in anything.’
"But it was always that kind, ‘Oh are you sure? He doesn’t need to know.’
“I blocked him because he just kept persisting. I then told my boyfriend, and he eventually told me it was him.”
She adds: “There was no ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve done this.’”
Rhona says the relationship ended shortly after but she is still struggling with the impact of what he did.
She said: “It has knocked my confidence. I really struggle with relationships now. I’ve not actually had a relationship that’s lasted any longer than three months since I dated him.”
In the documentary, Daisy also investigates the vigilante cheating video trend, where posters claim they have caught people cheating and ‘out’ them online.
The #cheatersgetcaught has had a whopping 2.1billion views on TikTok.
Big money business
These videos are often inconclusive but that doesn’t stop them from being viewed millions of times – and they can have far-reaching consequences.
In one such video of what appears to be a young couple sat opposite each other at an airport – and he is scrolling through pictures of women. The caption reads: “Who’s gonna tell her…!!???’
It has been viewed more than 400,000, with comments including: ‘Ladies, this is why you don’t sit opposite your man.’
Daisy said: “We don’t know that these two might not be in a relationship. This woman could be a stranger.”
She adds: “How brutal if this girl is his partner to find out that’s what he’s been doing when you were maybe sitting and waiting to catch a flight to go on holiday.”
With potentially big money involved, it’s no surprise outing ‘cheaters’ online has become so popular.
Daisy says in the documentary: “The lure of that kind of money means people might not think about the impact these vigilante videos can have.”
Liv, who also runs her own graphic design business and influencer agency, says she has taken a break from doing loyalty tests as she is too busy with work.
She says: “I don’t have the time to do them. It takes up a lot of time. You’re messaging the guy back and forth, messaging the girlfriend…You have to remember whose boyfriend is who.
“You have screenshot it all and edit it to take everyone’s names and pictures out.
“It was so overwhelming. I didn’t want to pick and choose people.”
Despite not making a “loyalty test” video for some time, she is still getting requests from girls now.
She says: “They will send messages with long paragraphs desperate for me to do it.”
Even though Liv is no longer offering her honey trap services, these women won’t have to look hard for someone else to test their partner’s loyalty.
She says: “There are a lot of other people who do them now.”
Despite some critics, she is adamant her reasons for doing the videos are altruistic.
She says: “In my case, there’s absolutely no way I’m exploiting people for money or followers.
“There are ‘likes’ but that doesn’t pay me. Doing the loyalty test was never ‘for me’.
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“There are people who will charge for it. There are agencies profiting from a rubbish situation. I did it to help people.”
Untold: Cheat Detectives will be available on All 4 on Monday 17th October.
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