A man in Taiwan paid dearly for spying on his wife with the help of a robot vacuum cleaner.

Taiwanese media recently reported a bizarre case of a man using footage of his wife’s infidelity in a lawsuit for damages.

Unfortunately, the footage was used against him by his wife in a counter-suit, as he videotaped his wife and her friend without their permission.

The man, whose name has not been disclosed, got married in 2021 and lived with his parents after marriage. While they also had a vacation home where they only visited during vacations.

During one such vacation in 2023, the man found a strange toothbrush at home, causing him to doubt his wife’s fidelity. He checked footage from surveillance cameras in the parking garage and saw a man who had dropped his wife off at work.

When he asked his wife about it, she denied any relationship, which he believed. However, three months later he found out that his wife was actually in a relationship with someone else.

He remotely activates the home’s robot vacuum cleaner through a mobile app to surprise his wife and talk to her through it, but instead he sees his wife with her friend and records a video of them using the vacuum cleaner and decides to file a case against his wife and use the video as bait.

He later sued his wife and demanded 2 million Taiwan dollars (about US$68,000) in damages. The judges ordered his wife and the man to pay him NT$500,000 in damages. However, this success of the husband ended when his wife also filed a counter-suit against him.

Although the video taken from the robot vacuum cleaner helped prove the wife’s infidelity, the same video also proved that he recorded the video of them without their consent.

The husband argued that his action was justified, but the court held that the husband had no right to make the video without his wife’s or the person’s consent.

Under Taiwanese law recording or disclosing a person’s private activities or information without notifying them is punishable by up to three years in prison and a fine of up to NT$300,000.