hidden camera
© NY Post photo compositeComputer forensics is the latest frontier in catching a cheating spouse, by uncovering deleted incriminating files
The sprawling Manhattan apartment had a gorgeous view of Central Park. But two quarter-size cameras with wide-angle pinhole lenses, discreetly hidden behind crown molding, were not there to photograph foliage. A financial-world heavyweight suspected that his wife was cheating with her office colleague, and he wanted to secure hard evidence.

The $3,000 secret setup "allowed him to monitor the apartment in real time on his phone," Michael Mancuso tells The Post.

Sounding as proud as any Hollywood auteur, Mancuso, the snoop-camera specialist and owner of Searching for the Truth Investigative Services, says, "Three days later, our client had what he needed: footage of his wife walking into their apartment with her boyfriend." Add that to salacious text messages extracted from her iPhone, and the cuckolded husband had reason for divorce.

Gone are the days of looking for lipstick traces or sniffing out perfume. Suspicious spouses have an array of far more advanced techniques at their disposal. Science and technology mean that no philanderers are safe.

This summer, rapper Iggy Azalea tweeted that she dumped her fiancé, Lakers shooting guard Nick Young, "because I found out he had brought other women into our home while I was away, and caught them on the security footage." And sources recently told Page Six that music-industry powerhouse attorney Joel Katz divorced his wife, Kane, after using video surveillance. (Kane denied the allegation and Katz wouldn't comment.)

But you don't have to be a bigwig with a team of PIs to uncover infidelity. Easy access to technology means that some tri-staters are opting to go the do-it-yourself route.

At PI Gear spy shop in Freehold, NJ, the No. 1 seller is a GPS device that tracks a vehicle's movement. Also popular: hidden cameras inside everyday items.

The shop's owner, Jimmie Mesis, recalls one woman who bought a telephone charger with a tiny camera. Concerned that her husband got frisky while she traveled, she wanted to see who came and went. "It turned out he was having sex on the sofa," says Mesis. "She was angry and happy [to be vindicated] at the same time. Everybody told her she was crazy for suspecting him [of cheating]. Now she had proof."

DIY sleuthing is so prevalent that CheatersSpyShop.com, a mail-order firm out of Dallas, caters to suspicious amateurs. Its president, Anna Lee, also serves as vice president of marketing and development for caught-in-the-act reality show "Cheaters."

Her in-demand items include CheckMate, a kit for detecting semen on clothing, and the iRecovery Stick, which retrieves deleted information off cellphones. Lee talks up a new credit card-size GPS tracker. "You can put it in a person's purse or pocket, but, by law, we can't recommend that," she says. In fact, laws involving spousal surveillance can be inconsistent, and those who do it should tread carefully.

While some pride themselves on their state-of-the-art gear, sometimes it's sufficient to rely on a cheater's technological ineptitude.

Kim Mishkin, co-founder of SAS for Women, a Manhattan-based support group for divorced women, recalls one member who exploited an Apple glitch to catch her duplicitous husband. "With the cloud, everything is shared," says Mishkin, who explains that the guy had his cellphone synced with the family's old iPad, which was going to charity. "His wife powered it up to make sure it still worked ... [and] spotted messages to his girlfriend." The pair soon divorced.

For people not lucky enough to live with careless spouses, digital forensics experts can dig deep into devices. At We Recover Data, headquartered in Manhattan, 40 percent of business comes from people seeking clues to the affairs of loved ones.

It turns out that hiding dirty pictures is easy — but permanently deleting them can be surprisingly difficult. "A lot of people think that if they empty the recycling bin, then the file is gone. It's not," says Scott Gibbs, director of digital forensics at We Recover Data. "Eighty percent of the time the suspicious spouse is right."

But distressed mates should be aware that such material can be unsettling. "We see photos of married people engaging in sex with [nonmarital] partners. People talk about where they will be meeting up and ... we see women saying that they can never enjoy their husbands again" after experiencing their new lovers.

Men, on the other hand, are less prone to dismiss wives while they're with paramours. Says Gibbs: "Most guys are happy just to be getting it."