I was asked to help two friends spy on their wives via key-logging and other computer related spying tools.

A little background on me, I am a network engineer by trade been in IT for 10+ years and have the knowledge and tools to be able to help get passwords, screen shots, key-loggers etc. Nothing very complex and shouldn't take more then a hour to fully setup on their home computers. This came about at a little gathering where we were talking at dinner with about 8 different couples, I explained how somebody was trying to spy on their co-worker/wife with a keylogger and he got fired and his wife is divorcing him. I got an alert from our corporate anti-virus monitor about this machine having a virus. Long story short after I did some investigating I found out this machine was infected by her husband who said this application would "speed" up her computer.

So anyways one of the guys was talking to me later alone at the party and was interested in the key-logging and asked if it was something I could do. I explained that it would be easy to do just need some alone time with his home computer. Well the more we got talking about it the more interested he was in it, turns out he wanted to spy on his wife he thinks is cheating on him. Not wanting to really be part of this I knew he would ask me how much I would charge to do this, so I thew what I thought was a high number out there of 500 usd cash to do this. His eyes light up like he had just won the lottery, apparently he called a few PI's who were 5-6 times more expensive then what I threw out and couldn't really do any of the computer spying. Well three days later another friend from the party called asking to help him like I was helping the other friend.

Really I have a few questions about this. First an extra $1000 cash this time of year would be nice. I am however morally kind of torn here, both of these men are married with kids. I could essentially be ripping a family apart, not to mention one of the wives I have been friends with since high school.

I really have no clue how legal this is, I figured with written permission from the husbands I wouldn't be really doing something illegal. Also say I do find something, could I be dragged into court and questioned by lawyers about the evidence? Finally in my part of the US (nothern/midwest) it doesn't seem like this is a market that has many people who do this type of work, could I explore doing this type of work part time to make some extra cash for my family?