“He was suspicious at first,” Camille Monzon admits to me, about her first “mission.” “He was like, ‘Oh, why me? What did you like about me? Why are you reaching out to me?’
Monzon is a 28-year-old with a day job as a project manager for a Big Tech firm. But she’s FaceTiming me from her Silicon Valley home to answer questions about her other gig: Conducting loyalty tests as a “checker” for the recently-launched website Lazo, which charges suspicious partners a fee to have an attractive third party slide into their sweetie’s DMs.
For Monzon’s first mission, Lazo’s term for these tests, a woman in Southern California reached out, suspecting that her boyfriend was sleeping around. After a $71 payment, Monzon DMed the woman’s boyfriend on Instagram, where she frequently posts ‘fit pics, selfies, and shots from the beach. After a few flirty back-and-forths, he wanted to set up a time to meet with Monzon; Monzon relayed the messages back to her client. The couple broke up.
“On one hand, it's like, fuck yeah, we got this guy,” Monzon told me. “But on the other hand, it’s like, ‘Fuck.’ This girl's life is…she's heartbroken now.”
Loyalty tests are exactly what they say on the tin: They purport to verify your partner’s fidelity by tempting them with a flirtatious message. If they reject the advance or ignore the message, that’s a “pass.” Anything else, from eager responses to linking up IRL, constitutes a “fail.”
These cross-examinations are part of a broader ecosystem of internet content that features crusaders getting revenge on garbage men, scratching the same cultural itch that emboldens the West Elm Caleb brouhaha, drives millions of women to join “are we dating the same guy?” Facebook groups, and facilitates on- and offline manhunts of various cheaters and their partners.
The trend combines classic bad habits like cheating and jealousy in a super-charged blend with modern problems: the ease of digital surveillance, the toxicity of virality, and the natural anxieties of online dating (we are, after, all, living through the first time in history that meeting total strangers with little, if any, pre-emptive social vetting is the most common way to find a partner.)
The idea of honey-trapping duplicitous lovers, though, is a familiar one. I grew up listening to the somehow-still-running pseudo-reality radio show Ryan’s Roses. Each episode, a person — often a woman — asks Ryan Seacrest (yes, that Ryan Seacrest) to send their partner — often a man — an offer of a dozen roses, to be sent to the person of their choosing. If the partner picks the caller (or their mother), it’s a pass. If they send them to someone else, the subsequent spat plays out on the radio for listeners’ entertainment.
The digital version, meanwhile, has existed in some capacity for as long as there have been apps that allow strangers to slide into DMs. This Instagram account, which dates back to 2015, briefly conducted loyalty tests for people using Kik. (God, remember Kik?)
With the rise of TikTok, influencers began offering their loyalty test services as a way to build a following. The For You page’s black-box algorithm serves the offers to people worried about their partners’ cheating ways; users then hire the honey traps (for free or a small fee) with the tacit agreement that any juicy conversations will be posted to the platform to build clout and advertise the services, generally with identifiable details blacked out.
Perhaps the most notable early loyalty tester was L.A. influencer Becca Moore, who parlayed her viral clips into internet microcelebrity — and dropped the loyalty tests once she was famous enough, because, as she said in a recent Instagram Reel, it “got depressing.”
Soon, of course, came more direct monetization. Folks like Florida influencer Trinity Howard and @madelinepleasehelp have gone pro, commodifying their services for a handsome price. Madeline, for example, sells Instagram relationship tests for $65 a pop; expedited tests go for $100 more. (To her credit, she offers 40% off her standard tests for anyone who can’t afford the fee.)
The business model seems to be a good one. The #loyaltytest tag on the platform is filled with tales of varying degrees of infidelities, from cheaters pretending to be single to setting up dates, all told through influencers’ front-facing camera recordings. (To be fair, some of the more viral ones, such as these man-on-the-street style loyalty test interviews, are probably fabricated.) In the comments, people voice their takes on these micro-dramas, as if they’re posting about Love Island or The Bachelorette.
Lately, enterprising app developers have been seeking to gig economy-fy the service, launching websites where suspicious partners can pick from a menu of hot young things to lure their beloved, like a temptation TaskRabbit.
Lazo is one of these services. As of early August, it had around 400 checkers — mostly women — who charge between $40 and $80 to honeypot cheating partners. Howard was one of the first checkers on Lazo, and is estimated to make around $1,000 a week on the platform.
Ashlyn Nakasu, the community manager for the site, said that more than 50,000 users have registered for their service since its launch at the beginning of the year. She declined to say how many missions, exactly, their providers have sold. When I asked her about the ethics of the endeavor, she was insistent that the service provided is a useful tool for the modern age.
“We just catch cheaters because we just feel like that's necessary,” she told me. “We should be outing these people. I know there's websites like Ashley Madison where you can go on and have an affair with these people. And I think with porn and everything, a lot of people have thoughts that cheating is normal now.”
She also advocated for the service as a useful way to solve problems of trust and communication in relationships.
“When communication is non-existent or it’s very hard to get the truth out and you have doubts, real doubts, then we want to be able to be there to just see what happens,” Nakasu told me.
To Stacy Torres, a sociologist at UCSF, these loyalty tests are emblematic of our current social conditions leading to a pervasive sense of distrust. The easy availability of information on the internet, the prevalence of misinformation, and, crucially, the growing skepticism toward traditional social institutions like marriage all contribute to the feeling that something is deeply amiss.
“There's no safe space in terms of what information you can trust that's out there, whether it’s politically related or something else,” Torres said. “Who are the people you can trust?”
For many heterosexual young women, loyalty tests are just another tool in their arsenal against the pitfalls of modern dating culture — situationships and ghosting and love-bombing and micro-cheating and all the other buzzwords that describe people treating each other badly in the on-to-the-next-one soup of online dating. Within that context, these loyalty tests have taken on a ‘girl power’ framing: Women who have never met, supporting each other to take down bad dudes. Many of the testers on Lazo self-describe as a “girls’ girl” or as “just a girl supporting other girls.”
The argument that these tests are simply leveling the playing field for women feels a bit hollow, though. It relies on buyers believing it’s easier, safer, or more useful to place their trust in a well-meaning stranger with no stake in their relationship than in their own partner. It also separates people from the power of communicating with their partners, and making their own choices, Torres pointed out.
Plus, by surreptitiously introducing a third-party to test the wheels on their relationships, people are engaging in their own deception. What happens to relationships when men pass? Monzon told me that it’s only happened to her once, but when a man did reject her advances, she’s pretty sure his partner kept the test a secret.
There may not be a buzzword for it, but this kind of testing seems very likely to be widening cracks in the foundations of already-shaky relationships. (Not for nothing, Lazo recently launched a monthly subscription program called Lazo+, where people can access unlimited loyalty tests.)
More than anything, these tests make me think of a Ryan’s Roses episode I caught in high school: A woman subjected her husband to the rose test, which he passed with flying colors. And still, the woman screamed at him on air, laying out a litany of times she was convinced he’d been unfaithful.
He may have passed the contrived test, but between them, the two had already failed.
