I’m a TikTok honey trap girl – I use a sneaky trick to publicly shame love ‘cheats’
GONE are the days of paying a “honey trapper” to trail your boyfriend to a pub to check if he is faithful – you can now hire glamorous TikTokkers to do the job instead.
The fastest-growing social media network — which has garnered 750millions users from its diet of lip-syncing, cat capers and group dances — is breeding a generation of women willing to test men’s loyalty to their partners.
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The modern-day relationship sleuths use their TikTok accounts to invite worried wives and girlfriends to send in their partner’s social media details so they can then attempt to lure the men into “cheating” with flirty dialogue over direct messages.
And with 2,000 new views of “loyalty test” posts every minute on TikTok, it is fast becoming a lucrative market.
The honey trappers either request a fee for their services or, more often, permission to publish the results, which in turn they monetise through lucrative sponsorship deals.
One of the first British TikTokkers to get in on the act was Liv Shelby, 19, who tells the Sun she receives “hundreds of messages a week” from women begging her to “slide into” their partners’ DMs.
While Liv does not charge a fee for her services — she insists that what started out as a bit of “fun” turned into a desire to “help people” — many other honey trappers are making thousands of pounds a week.
Liv, from Manchester, first offered a loyalty test 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 enthusiast Liv, who has 150,000 followers on TikTok, can get paid up to £2,000 for a sponsored post by motor brands.
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The social media manager says she only agrees 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 message the man, usually asking for his Snapchat or phone number, before telling his partner how he responded.
Some of her most popular loyalty- test videos have been watched more than 2million times.
It is hard to imagine many men being able to resist Liv — a beautiful brunette — when she contacts them.
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.”
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One man was even replying to Liv’s messages while sat next to his suspicious girlfriend.
Liv, who got a “trust no one” tattoo on her arm following a bad break-up, 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.
“I always make them aware beforehand that I make the videos for TikTok and entertainment purposes.”
In one video that went viral, Liv’s 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 a test is complete, Liv blocks the men. While some would not consider flirty social media messages as adultery, Liv believes it is a dumpable offence.
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She is featured in a new documentary, Cheat Detectives: The Loyalty Test, which investigates the social media phenomenon.
In the All 4 progamme, fronted by Kiss FM Breakfast show host Daisy Maskell, Liv says: “You don’t answer if you’re going to be loyal. If they say ‘hey’ they’re halfway 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’.”
Some men have fallen for the bait only to be tipped off by a friend who is familiar with Liv’s account.
She 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 then tell their girlfriends they knew who I was and were just going along with it.”
But it is not just men who are being put to the test. Liv says: “There’s a boy from Manchester who has started doing girls.”
The documentary, part of a new current affairs strand called Untold aimed at younger viewers, also hears from a young woman who was the target of a loyalty test.
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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 pictureperfect 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, host Daisy also investigates a video trend where strangers claim they have caught people cheating and “out” them online.
It was just so overwhelming
The #cheatersgetcaught has had a whopping 2.1billion views on TikTok.
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, a man and woman sit opposite each other at an airport as he scrolls through pictures of other 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: “They might not even be in a relationship. This woman could be a stranger.”
She adds: “How brutal, if this girl is his partner, to find out that is 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 is no surprise outing “cheaters” online has become so popular.
Daisy says: “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 to 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 posting any honey-trap videos for some time, Liv is still receiving requests from women to test their partners.
She says: “They will send messages with long paragraphs desperate for me to do it.”
But the women will not have to look hard for another honey trapper — as a simple browse on TikTok will deliver hundreds of alternatives.
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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’. There are people who charge for it. There are agencies profiting from a rubbish situation. I did it to help people.”
- Cheat Detectives is on All 4 now
