Married love-rat UK businessman who contacted prostitutes on iMessage pursues Apple for £5m he lost in the divorce - after his wife found the 'deleted' texts on the family iMac
A married love-rat businessman who contacted prostitutes on iMessage is taking Apple to court over the £5million he lost when his wife divorced him after she found the 'deleted' texts on the family iMac.
Richard, not his real name, said he had started meeting prostitutes in the later years of his marriage, speaking to them over iMessage. After agreeing to meet them, he would delete the messages, believing that they would never resurface again.
But to his horror, when his wife clicked on iMessage on the linked family iMac, it showed the last message he had sent to another person's iPhone was to a prostitute.
When she delved into the messages further, she uncovered several years' worth of messages to prostitutes which her husband thought would never appear again, The Times reports.
After unearthing her husband's trail of his infidelity, she filed for divorce within a month.
Richard, not his real name, said he had started meeting prostitutes in the later years of his marriage, speaking to them over iMessage. (File image of iMessage on phone)
When his wife clicked on iMessage on the linked family iMac, it showed the last message he had sent to another person's iPhone was to a prostitute. (File image of iMessage on laptop)
Richard, a middle-aged businessman and father from England, is now launching legal action against Apple in a bid to recover the £5million he lost in the divorce, plus legal costs.
He claims the tech giant does not make it clear that iMessages sent to another iPhone user can be seen on other linked Apple devices - even if they have been deleted on the phone.
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 told the newspaper that he and his wife were happily married for over 20 years until his infidelity was exposed.
He believes that what he was doing was not as bad as having a full-on affair and that the couple may have been able to get through the saga if it 'hadn't been so sudden and brutal and upsetting'.
Richard said that he thought he was going to have a heart attack from the stress the situation has caused and has had to take beta blockers to reduce panic attacks.
Richard, a middle-aged businessman and father from England, is now launching legal action against Apple in a bid to recover the £5million he lost in the divorce, plus legal costs. (File image)
London law firm Rosenblatt is taking the legal action against Apple. It is looking into the possibility of a class action lawsuit on a no-win, no-fee basis.
Richard says since his divorce he has heard of others experiencing the same problems he did.
In one instance, he says one father's messages were going to a teenage son's iMac, which led him to see messages he should not have.
And in another case, messages being sent by a man on his phone downstairs were appearing on an Apple TV being watched by the wife upstairs.
Simon Walton, from Rosenblatt, told The Times that Apple is being 'misleading' by telling iPhone users that their messages are being deleted when they are still being found on other linked devices.
MailOnline has contacted Apple for comment.
