A UK man is trying to take tech giant Apple to court for £5 million ($6.3 million), accusing the company of revealing his private messages with other women to his wife by synchronizing his iPhone with the family iMac.

In the last few years of his marriage, Richard (not the man’s real name) had been soliciting the services of sex workers whom he had messaged using his personal iPhone. He had always been very careful to delete the messages from his phone but claimed not to have known that Apple makes it possible to share messages via its various platforms (iPhone, iPad, or iMac) when logging into the same account. One day, when his wife logged into the same family account on the iMac, she discovered years of spicy messages between Richard and multiple other women, who turned out to be sex workers. She ended up divorcing him and walking away with over $6.3 million. Richard blames Apple for everything and he wants the American company to compensate him.

Photo: Onur Binay/Unsplash

“If you are told a message is deleted you are entitled to believe it’s deleted,” Richard told The Times. “If the message had said: ‘These messages are deleted on this device’ that would have been a clue. ‘These messages are deleted on this device only,’ would have been a much clearer indicator.”

Richard now wants Apple to compensate him both for the £5 million he had to pay his wife in the divorce and the legal fees and to that end, he has turned to London law firm Rosenblatt for assistance. He is now seeking a class-action lawsuit and invites Apple users in similar situations to speak up and join him in his crusade against the tech giant.

In many cases, the iPhone informs the user that the messages have been deleted, but, as we have seen, this is not true and is misleading, because they are still found on other linked devices, something that Apple does not tell its users,” Rosenblatt’s Simon Walton said. “This strongly suggests that Apple is concerned enough about this issue to hope that it will go away by ignoring it, or that it simply does not care about the rights of its users.”

Speaking specifically about his case, Richard argued that Apple’s way of revealing his infidelity to his wife ruined any chance of salvaging their 20-year marriage.

“There would have been a way through it if the realization hadn’t been so sudden and brutal and upsetting,” Richard told The Times. “We had been very happily married for over 20 years. A superb marriage was thrown away over something many men and some women do.”