Woman fined $2000 for reading cheating husband's emails
A woman has been fined $2,000 in court after she was caught checking her husband's emails on their shared computer when she suspected him of cheating.
The unnamed woman, from Switzerland, accessed her partner's account after using a password which was written down next to their computer, Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung reported.
The woman's initial intuition proved to be correct as she discovered her husband was having several affairs over a considerable period of time.
She confronted her husband with the revelation who then moved out of their home and proceeded to file legal action against her saying that his privacy had been breached.
"He had been in contact with several women for a long time," the woman said in a court hearing.
"I confronted him with his affairs, and he moved out of our flat relatively quickly."
In December she was convicted of intentionally and repeatedly hacking her husband's account and downloading material that belonged to him.
While the defence said the woman hadn't actually hacked the email account because she knew the password, her internet searches showed that before committing the act she had researched whether it was illegal to access someone else's emails.
Under Article 145 of the Swiss criminal code, reading a person's password-protected data is illegal and perpetrators can face a fine and up to three years in prison.
She was initially fined $11,800 but had it reduced to $2,000 after the woman had to "exert minimal criminal energy" to access the emails due to her "husband's carelessness".
