The number one place affairs begin is much closer to home than we realised, a PI reveals.

Luke Athens has spent the last 20 years of his working life tracking down cheating partners as a private investigator.

Director of the aptly titled private investigations company Heartbreakers, Athens knows what is that makes someone stray, how they go about their stealth betrayals and where it is they’ll go upon first deciding to cheat.

This, he believes, is the era of social media infidelity. The bored and disillusioned aren’t meeting their potential flings at work or out for drinks anymore like the stereotype would lead us to believe. The real danger, it seems, lies behind a screen within a virtual world where conversations aren’t awkward, photos are carefully curated and opportunities endless.

It’s Facebook.

According to Athens, Facebook is one of the “key initiators in people straying” and from the vast majority of his investigations, Facebook was where nearly half of all affairs began.

“More generally, people are meeting each other through social media which is the foundation of a relationship and they move forward from there,” he tells Mamamia.

Nikki Gemmell on MMOL: I’m too tired to care if my husband cheats on me. Post continues after video.

“As people become more social, there’s more connectivity between everyone and what we’ve found is that has created more opportunity. And when there’s more opportunity, it leads to other things. So, it’s the opportunity and the access that means if they want to have that fling, it’s available for them. Temptation, sometimes, is too great.”

In hindsight, it’s not too much of a stretch to consider how much the fundamentals of infidelity have changed as the nature of communication has changed, too. If so many of our own relationships are spent communicating online, why should affairs be any different?

Interestingly, it’s the idea that Facebook presents a cleverly curated ‘highlights reel’ of someone’s day-to-day life that is a catalyst of so many affairs starting online. A grass-is-always-greener kind of attitude is fuelling delusion and disenchantment and it’s this, Athens believes, that eases the cheating process. That ‘highlights reel’ becomes a very attractive option for someone unhappy in their relationship.

“It’s very one-sided, social media,” Athens says.

“It only shows you the good side… People only post the things that are good in their life and it means it’s a false misrepresentation of someone and their life.”

So, how do they go about actually catching these people out on behalf of their suspicious spouses? And is what Athens’ crew do just glorified Facebook stalking?

Perhaps not. Bluntly, if it was, Athens would be out of work. In baby-speak for tech-amateurs like you or I, he uses the term “gadgets” a lot. He has a whole lot of gadgets. In fact, over $250,000 worth of gadgets.

"Some of the stuff we have access to are things like databases that are location driven, so we know where you are, even when you upload a photo on Twitter.

"For example, when you upload that photo, in the backend of that photo, there’s metadata and that tells me the serial data of your iPhone, the kind of phone it was taken from, the date, the time, and your longitude and latitude co-ordinates. So, we can look at that and say bang, we know where you were at any certain time," he says.

It's these kind of techniques that means Athens' company can successfully find proof of cheating for 90-95 per cent of his clients. Having a case where the suspect is innocent is "extremely rare", he says. It's the proof, at the end of the day, clients come for. It's believed that 98 per cent of people will deny having an affair until they are confronted with evidence.

"People always get so worked up about the fact we are tracking their socials and think we are invading their privacy. But what they fail to recognise is when you sign up to Facebook, you’re accepting their terms and their conditions. People forget that Facebook get your data and on sell your information. We basically use tools – expensive tools – to help use that information."

A long-term expert on this idea of social media infidelity, where a relationship is sparked through online conversations, Athens believes there are some things individuals can do if they are feeling uncomfortable about the state of their relationship.

He believes "a lot more partners now are deleting the information on their phone" rather than using a separate as a means of pretending they have nothing to hide. If that's the case, Athens has a tip:

On an iPhone go to Settings, Privacy Diagnostic and Usage Data (for the tech heads, you will need to scroll through a lot of information though you will find a link to the last connection point the phone visited). On an Android phone go to: Settings,  Applications,  Internet,  Advanced,  Manage Website Data. This will then show information relating to internet history visited of recent. Another way is to monitor the data usage details in settings, Data usage: You can select the application of interest and view the data usage for the past 4 months. This will help reflect and confirm what they have been looking at and interacting with online, despite having deleted the information.

Or alternatively, you could just hire a private investigator like more and more Australians are beginning to do.