Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2000/02/15/web_site_offers_fake_alibi/

Web site offers fake alibi for philanderers

Your cheating heart

By Linda Harrison

Posted in On-Prem, 15th February 2000 16:11 GMT

A British Website has started offering a fake alibi service for men and women cheating on their partners. For a small fee, Alibi.co.uk will write and send false invitations for business events (£25), or telephone the unfaithful's partner "confirming" that their beloved will be caught up in a meeting (£15). The Lancashire-based site, which started eight months ago, is also able to provide accommodation addresses or confirmation of hotel bookings on request. Annual membership for philanderers costs £20 per year. "With the pressures of modern life many of us have occasion to stray from our long term partners and dally with a brief sexual or emotional relationship with a third party," the site claims. "This is often a short term affair, inconsequential to our long term plans and relationships. But with modern communications, and media, it has become increasingly difficult to be able to carry on such a temporary dalliance, without risk of detection." And so it goes on. "We will provide telephone answering so that if someone tries to contact you, our receptionists will handle the call in the manner which was pre-arranged with you. "As maybe a hotel receptionist, or a golf club secretary, she will offer to call your room, or have you paged, giving recognition to the fact that you are actually resident in the facility." Denise Knowles, a councillor and sex therapist with Relate (formerly known as the Marriage Guidance Council), was not impressed by the idea. "If people are having an affair they need to be able to sort the problems out within the relationship. "For someone to make it easier for them to cheat could be very dangerous and damaging," she said. "You have to question the scruples, the morals, involving a third or fourth party in the deception." Ronnie Brock, founder and MD of alibi.co.uk, says the fibbing performs a valuable service to society and actually holds marriages together. "We are protecting the family. These people don't have sex with their husbands or wives anymore. But they still love their families," said Brock. "This service stops them losing their jobs, families and homes." According to Brock, a married man who insists he does not use the service himself, the site has 18,000 members - 40 per cent of whom are women. He also claimed that the company had many famous people on its books.®