What to do next

Whatever you have found, or not found, the order below is the one that family violence specialists recommend. It is built around one idea: the moment someone loses their access is often the moment they escalate, so the plan comes before the cleanup.

1. If you are in danger right now

Call 000.

If there are threats to your safety but it is not an emergency, the police assistance line is 131 444.

2. Talk to someone before you change anything

1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732. Free, confidential, 24 hours, phone or online chat.

Call from a phone you trust. If the phone you are worried about is nearby, it may be able to hear the room, so make the call somewhere else.

They can help you think through the thing this website cannot: what the other person is likely to do, and what timing is safest for you. You know your situation better than any website does, and they will treat you that way.

If you use an Android phone and you have a real reason to think there is spyware on it, WESNET ask people to contact them from a safe device. They are the specialists in this exact problem.

3. Decide about evidence before you clean up, not after

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that cannot be undone.

Installing monitoring software on someone's phone to spy on them is against the law in Australia. That means what is on your phone may be proof. If you remove it, you remove the proof at the same time.

If you think you might want to go to police, do not wipe the phone. Speak to them first, because they may have a particular process for examining a phone. While you are waiting, the usual advice is to put the phone in aeroplane mode and keep it charged, so that nothing more is recorded and nothing already on it is lost.

Know what that costs, because it is the opposite of the advice in step 4. A phone in aeroplane mode has gone quiet, and going quiet can by itself tell the other person that something has changed. These are two different plans and you cannot follow both at once:

• If you are keeping this phone as proof, it goes out of use from that moment. That is a visible change. Decide the timing with a support worker, and if you can, have another phone working in your hand before this one goes quiet.
• If you are not keeping it as proof, leave it in normal use and follow step 4 instead.

One warning that is easy to miss. If monitoring software tracks location, then taking the phone to a police station tells the other person that the phone is at a police station. If that would put you at risk, leave the phone somewhere ordinary, or talk it through with 1800RESPECT first.

4. Use a device they cannot reach

This is often more useful than anything you can do to the phone itself.

A borrowed phone, a work computer or a library computer will do. Some family violence services can help you get a phone of your own. Ask your worker, or ask 1800RESPECT.

Use it for the things that need to be private: talking to services, looking for housing, legal advice, and any account changes.

Keep using the old phone normally. A phone that suddenly goes silent is itself a signal.

This does not apply if you decided in step 3 to keep that phone as proof. In that case it is going quiet on purpose, and when it goes quiet is a timing decision to make with your worker rather than something to avoid.

5. Take your accounts back, in one planned go

When your plan says the timing is safe:

• Start with your email, because it is what everything else is recovered through. Then your Apple Account or Google account. Then banking, then social media.
• Do it from the device they cannot reach, not from the phone you are worried about.
• Turn on two factor authentication as you go, and check the recovery phone number and recovery email on each account, because those are often where access has been quietly left behind.
• Sign out every device you do not recognise.
• Do it in one session rather than spread over weeks. A slow trickle of changes is easier to notice than a single planned change.

6. Then, and only then, deal with the phone

If your plan says it is safe, updating the phone, changing the account passwords, and in some cases a factory reset can clear many kinds of monitoring software. Not all of it, which is why the specialists ask you to talk to them rather than rely on a website.

If you do reset, set the phone up as new rather than restoring from an old backup. A backup can carry the problem straight back onto the clean phone.

A new phone, with a new account made on that phone, is the most reliable answer. It is also the most expensive one, which is another reason to ask a service for help rather than doing this alone.

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