When Cassie helped her friend catch a cheating boyfriend, she got an idea.

Cassie was having some wine with her friends when she got the idea.

"One of them thought her partner might be cheating," she told Mamamia. "It's always fun to have a D&M (deep and meaningful), but we were like, 'What do we actually do about it?'"

When one of the girls suggested a private investigator, the idea seemed laughable.

"You picture these old men in trench coats with a cigar going, 'Don't worry, lovely, I'll go find what your hubby's doing'," Cassie said. 

Nevertheless, she was intrigued, and started looking into private investigation.

The more Cassie researched, the more she realised there was a gap in the market for cases involving dating and relationships, particularly for young women.

Watch: The number one cheating sign that everyone misses. Post continues after video.

"I wanted to provide a service where it felt like you were talking to a girlfriend. Thinking your partner is cheating is one of the most horrible experiences in life, and the idea of sitting down with an old man and telling him your deepest secrets… Yeah, no."

Now, I know what you might be thinking… we all dreamed of being a private investigator after watching Veronica Mars. Cassie, however, actually followed through and got certified.

She enroled in a private investigation course in 2023, and soon enough, she had a Cert III in investigative services. After a police check and fingerprinting, Cassie got her license in Queensland and launched her business, Venus Investigations. 

"I got the name from Veronica Mars," she said (I knew it!), noting that it was an ode to 'Mars Investigations' from the show.

Since then, Cassie has been juggling her day job with her private investigations.

"Luckily, most people are doing dodgy stuff at night," she laughed.

Women reach out to Venus about all things relationships — from background checks on potential partners to cheating allegations. And business is growing by the day — Cassie receiving a few dozen requests for background checks per week.

"I know so many women who have gone through dating apps and met horrible men, whether that's physical, emotional, or psychological distress they've been in from these men," she said.

"The idea with the dating background checks is, hopefully, you can pick up some of those red flags before you even go on the first date. If you're finding out stuff about them, and you're a few months in, and you've got those rose-coloured glasses, it's much harder to get out before things get bad."

As for how much it will cost to catch a cheater, Cassie's rate changes case-by-case depending on "what success looks like for the client".

"Some people, they just want to know if they're cheating. That's it. They don't want to know the details," Cassie said. "They don't need to know who, what, where, when. That's enough for them."

No matter the complexity, the investigator aims to solve every case from the comfort of her own home, before it gets to the point of on-the-ground surveillance.

"Quite often cheaters are not always that smart, and you can find those answers pretty easily online," she said.

"Whether it's social media, dating apps, or checking things like that, you can find things very easily and cheaply. But if [a case requires] me sitting in the car for hours at a time, it can get a bit more expensive."

While Cassie has to keep relatively tight-lipped about her specific cases for privacy reasons, some clients are happy for their stories to be shared anonymously.

Like this one…

"One client and her husband were living in Queensland, and he had family in New South Wales, but never really went to visit them much outside of Mum's birthday, Christmas, the usual kind of thing," Cassie explained.

"Suddenly, he was going on these [solo] trips to NSW really frequently, and it just didn't sit right with her."

As Cassie is only licensed as a PI in Queensland, trailing the husband from the Sunshine coast, and then finding another PI to trail him to regional NSW, would have been incredibly expensive. So, she tried a different method.

"The couple had one shared account. There wasn't that much information, but the client could see there were some transactions from Bunnings, Kmart, a few places like that.

"So I said to her, 'Have you got any reward apps for those places? Everyday Rewards, Flybuys, anything like that, where you have a shared account?'"

The woman confirmed that she and her husband shared a Flybuys account. Upon Cassie's instruction, she searched the app for clues.

"She could see exactly the suburb [the transactions] happened in, the time they happened, which was always during these secret trips to NSW. The locations were actually in Gympie, which is about 80 kilometres north of the Sunshine Coast where they lived. It was also where his ex-girlfriend lived; she was the only person he knew in Gympie."

The 'eggplant' case, however, proved more complex to solve.

"[The client] never received emojis from her partner," Cassie explained. "So I said, go and look at his most recently used emojis on his phone. And the 'eggplant' was his most used emoji. She had never got that from him, and I don't think he was sending it to his mum."

While an eggplant emoji wasn't damning enough to close the case, it was suspicious enough to prompt Cassie to do on-the-ground surveillance to prove his infidelity.

Some clients request the PI to hack into their partner's phone or go through their bank records, but Cassie says the privacy laws in Australia forbid such measures.

"In America, privacy laws are so loose, you could basically do whatever you want. So a lot of people come to me expecting similar stuff in Australia, but we have such strict privacy laws for good reason."

Sadly, most of the time, the women that bring their suspicions to Cassie are proven right.

"We're often told to ignore our instincts and give people the benefit of the doubt, particularly as women. So by the time they come to me, they've been having these thoughts for months or years. It's not often a spur-of-the-moment thing for them, it's a million little things not adding up."

Breaking the news of infidelity is a delicate task for Cassie, who has been trained in counselling.

"Wherever possible, I try to do it in an in-person meeting. The whole point of Venus is to have a very empathetic approach compared to normal PIs. You just try and be as gentle as possible, but really clear about what you have found. Ideally, you have photographic and video evidence as well, because the first instinct is often denial."

While Cassie loves helping women uncover the truth, she says the mission of Venus is "almost to make the business itself redundant".

"What I really want is for dating apps is for the government to be doing a lot more to protect women," she said. "Hopefully we can, as we grow, put some pressure on that, but also protect women with what we offer.

"I just think it's ridiculous in this day and age, from the technology we have in 2025, that anyone with a long history of domestic violence could just hop on a dating app, create an account, and go out with women who are none the wiser." 

You can check out Venus Investigations here.

Feature Image: Supplied.