Hacker services are doing a roaring trade in the US offering access to partner's email accounts for less than $100, according to the Washington Post.

The Post was apparently amazed that women were paying hackers to find out if their husbands were cheating on them by getting the passwords for their email accounts from pirate sites. The charges for services from the likes of  YourHackerz.com, ''piratecrackers.com'' and ''hackmail.net'' are small but apparently they are doing a roaring trade.

The industry came to light during he recent court case of Elaine Cioni who was having an affair with a married man.  When she found out he was cheating on her, she splashed out $100, and got her boyfriend's wife's password, the password of another girlfriend and the boyfriend's children.

What attracted the attention of the coppers was when she started use technology to change her voice and make harassing phone calls to her boyfriend and his family, using a ''spoofing'' service to disguise her voice as a man's. She was eventually jailed for 15 months. Pirates say they have no problems hacking into Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo accounts. The Post could not find where YourHackerz.com was based but concluded that it was probably outside the US.

All the services advertise that they will email a screenshot of the target's inbox or even send an email from the target's account as proof that they've cracked the password. The customer then sends payment. One service then responds with the script of a scene from a Shakespeare play, with the stolen password hidden in the copy.