Global Intelligence claims its Cybercheck technology can help cops find key evidence to nail a case. But a WIRED investigation reveals the smoking gun often appears far less solid.
“There is a lack of peer review and transparency in [Cybercheck’s] algorithmic processes, which makes me question the legitimacy, sufficiency, and legality of the datasets used for accurate profiling and geolocation,” Lee tells WIRED. “The claim of achieving this level of accuracy using only open source data without further validation and transparency in the tool’s methods and data sources is highly suspicious and questionable.”
A Global Intelligence employee tells WIRED that law enforcement works with “industry analysts and experts in the open source intelligence space who are manually replicating and backstopping intelligence data from our reports.” They add that “investigations and prosecutions only move ahead on the strength
of the evidence gathered by agencies and verified after backstopping Cybercheck intelligence.” The company’s response did not address claims that certain data, such as whether a device connected to a specific Wi-Fi network, are typically not accessible via open source methods.
“Completely False”
During the Black murder trial in November 2022, Mosher testified that, since January 2021, Cybercheck had run approximately 1,900 searches for suspects’ historical locations and another 1,000 searches for their real-time locations. Out of those 2,900 searches, Mosher testified, there was only one search in which the individual didn’t turn out to be in the location Cybercheck listed for their cyber profile.
But in interviews with WIRED and in emails obtained by WIRED through public records requests, more than one of Cybercheck’s law enforcement clients allege the company’s technology provided information that investigators were unable to substantiate or that contradicted reliable sources.
In January, Mark Kollar, an assistant superintendent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), wrote an email to Cybercheck about a search warrant his agency had served to an email provider seeking information about an account that Cybercheck linked to a suspect. “The email provider is saying that the email listed in the Cybercheck report doesn’t exist and has never existed,” Kollar wrote.
The Ohio BCI, which is a division of the state attorney general’s office, entered into a $30,000 trial contract with Cybercheck in August 2023 and submitted more than a dozen cases to the company, Steve Irwin, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, tells WIRED. “BCI has not received results on many of the cases and some of the leads produced haven’t panned out,” he says. “Due to the lack of investigative leads that have been produced, BCI has no intentions of entering into another contract with the company.”
The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office, in Washington, signed an $11,000 contract in 2022 allowing them to submit 20 cases to Cybercheck. “I think we still have access to Cybercheck, but we don’t use it,” Casey Schilperoort, the sheriff’s public information officer, wrote in an email. “I heard that we don’t receive much or accurate information.”
In an unofficial email chain in which investigators from different agencies shared their experiences with the technology, which WIRED obtained through a public record request, Aurora, Colorado detective Nicholas Lesnansky wrote that Cybercheck had identified someone as a suspect in one of his department’s homicide cases because the person’s cyber profile pinged a router located at an address of interest. “Detectives went and spoke to the resident at that home who has lived there for 20+ years and never had a router by that name so we can’t corroborate their information,” Lesnansky wrote. Neither Mosher nor Global Intelligence responded to WIRED’s inquiry about Lesnansky’s claims.
In a second Aurora case involving the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old, Global Intelligence staff were “adamant” that Cybercheck had identified the killer, but Lesnansky’s investigation was pointing toward an individual he considered a more likely suspect. “They then came up with a scenario where it was a gang initiation thing where the person they had identified was driving the person I think is more likely around,” Lesnansky wrote. “I doubt the suspect Cybercheck identified and the other person I find more likely are driving around together as one has had his house shot up by the other several times.”
On the same email chain, Heather Collins, a special victims unit intelligence analyst with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, wrote that she used Cybercheck on a missing juvenile case. “They gave us information on possible ‘suspects’ and it wound up being completely false. We located the missing juvenile using other methods. They wasted our time.”
Mosher did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Collins’ allegation that the information Global Intelligence provided was false.
In other cases, Cybercheck appears to have produced accurate information, although investigators weren’t always able to act on it.
Joe Moylan, the public information officer for the Aurora Police Department, says that his agency has requested information from Cybercheck on five cases, and that in two of those cases the technology was “beneficial to the investigations,” although no arrests have been made as a result.
In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.
Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment shop in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a picture shown on the Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries. After Unbehaun was located, Eichholz learned during the follow-up investigation that, until several months earlier, the pair had indeed been living in Oregon.
“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and go with it,” Eichholz says. “That was always the hang-up for us. ‘OK, you got me this information, but I still have to check and verify and do my thing with search warrants.’” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is ongoing.
Any Help They Can Get
Cybercheck has spread to law enforcement agencies across the country thanks to generous marketing offers and word-of-mouth recommendations. But in interviews with WIRED and the email exchanges we examined, there was little evidence that law enforcement agencies sought or received evidence to support Global Intelligence’s claims about what its technology could do.
Prosecutors who spoke to WIRED, such as Borden from Midland County, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction had been using it. And when it came up in a case, they let the adversarial court system decide whether or not it was legitimate.
“It was new technology and I was curious, so I was like, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how far we can get,’” Borden says. “I’m thankful that it didn’t come into evidence in my case, that I didn’t need it to get my conviction.”
Emails show Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police departments’ cases through Cybercheck for free in order to demonstrate the technology. They also referenced cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high profile and that Cybercheck supposedly helped solve, without naming the cases outright or providing evidence that Cybercheck had made any difference in the investigations.
Emails obtained by WIRED from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation show that investigators were initially excited to see what information Cybercheck could provide about their cold cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. That enthusiasm seems to have helped convince other agencies to trust the company.
Gessner, from the Summit County Prosecutor’s office, says that when his agency was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked the Ohio BCI’s cybercrimes unit for an opinion. “They said, yes, it makes sense … we don’t have the technology to do this, but we’d love to have it.” County prosecutors also reached out to the SANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute didn’t “do this type of stuff.”
But even as it has withdrawn evidence that Cybercheck provided, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies whether they can do the same kind of open source locating that Global Intelligence marketed.
“We don’t want to shut doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.
Here's part 4
“There is a lack of peer review and transparency in [Cybercheck’s] algorithmic processes, which makes me question the legitimacy, sufficiency, and legality of the datasets used for accurate profiling and geolocation,” Lee tells WIRED. “The claim of achieving this level of accuracy using only open source data without further validation and transparency in the tool’s methods and data sources is highly suspicious and questionable.”
A Global Intelligence employee tells WIRED that law enforcement works with “industry analysts and experts in the open source intelligence space who are manually replicating and backstopping intelligence data from our reports.” They add that “investigations and prosecutions only move ahead on the strength
of the evidence gathered by agencies and verified after backstopping Cybercheck intelligence.” The company’s response did not address claims that certain data, such as whether a device connected to a specific Wi-Fi network, are typically not accessible via open source methods. “Completely False”
During the Black murder trial in November 2022, Mosher testified that, since January 2021, Cybercheck had run approximately 1,900 searches for suspects’ historical locations and another 1,000 searches for their real-time locations. Out of those 2,900 searches, Mosher testified, there was only one search in which the individual didn’t turn out to be in the location Cybercheck listed for their cyber profile.
But in interviews with WIRED and in emails obtained by WIRED through public records requests, more than one of Cybercheck’s law enforcement clients allege the company’s technology provided information that investigators were unable to substantiate or that contradicted reliable sources.
In January, Mark Kollar, an assistant superintendent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), wrote an email to Cybercheck about a search warrant his agency had served to an email provider seeking information about an account that Cybercheck linked to a suspect. “The email provider is saying that the email listed in the Cybercheck report doesn’t exist and has never existed,” Kollar wrote.
The Ohio BCI, which is a division of the state attorney general’s office, entered into a $30,000 trial contract with Cybercheck in August 2023 and submitted more than a dozen cases to the company, Steve Irwin, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, tells WIRED. “BCI has not received results on many of the cases and some of the leads produced haven’t panned out,” he says. “Due to the lack of investigative leads that have been produced, BCI has no intentions of entering into another contract with the company.”
The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office, in Washington, signed an $11,000 contract in 2022 allowing them to submit 20 cases to Cybercheck. “I think we still have access to Cybercheck, but we don’t use it,” Casey Schilperoort, the sheriff’s public information officer, wrote in an email. “I heard that we don’t receive much or accurate information.”
In an unofficial email chain in which investigators from different agencies shared their experiences with the technology, which WIRED obtained through a public record request, Aurora, Colorado detective Nicholas Lesnansky wrote that Cybercheck had identified someone as a suspect in one of his department’s homicide cases because the person’s cyber profile pinged a router located at an address of interest. “Detectives went and spoke to the resident at that home who has lived there for 20+ years and never had a router by that name so we can’t corroborate their information,” Lesnansky wrote. Neither Mosher nor Global Intelligence responded to WIRED’s inquiry about Lesnansky’s claims.
In a second Aurora case involving the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old, Global Intelligence staff were “adamant” that Cybercheck had identified the killer, but Lesnansky’s investigation was pointing toward an individual he considered a more likely suspect. “They then came up with a scenario where it was a gang initiation thing where the person they had identified was driving the person I think is more likely around,” Lesnansky wrote. “I doubt the suspect Cybercheck identified and the other person I find more likely are driving around together as one has had his house shot up by the other several times.”
On the same email chain, Heather Collins, a special victims unit intelligence analyst with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, wrote that she used Cybercheck on a missing juvenile case. “They gave us information on possible ‘suspects’ and it wound up being completely false. We located the missing juvenile using other methods. They wasted our time.”
Mosher did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Collins’ allegation that the information Global Intelligence provided was false.
In other cases, Cybercheck appears to have produced accurate information, although investigators weren’t always able to act on it.
Joe Moylan, the public information officer for the Aurora Police Department, says that his agency has requested information from Cybercheck on five cases, and that in two of those cases the technology was “beneficial to the investigations,” although no arrests have been made as a result.
In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.
Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment shop in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a picture shown on the Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries. After Unbehaun was located, Eichholz learned during the follow-up investigation that, until several months earlier, the pair had indeed been living in Oregon.
“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and go with it,” Eichholz says. “That was always the hang-up for us. ‘OK, you got me this information, but I still have to check and verify and do my thing with search warrants.’” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is ongoing. Any Help They Can Get
Cybercheck has spread to law enforcement agencies across the country thanks to generous marketing offers and word-of-mouth recommendations. But in interviews with WIRED and the email exchanges we examined, there was little evidence that law enforcement agencies sought or received evidence to support Global Intelligence’s claims about what its technology could do.
Prosecutors who spoke to WIRED, such as Borden from Midland County, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction had been using it. And when it came up in a case, they let the adversarial court system decide whether or not it was legitimate.
“It was new technology and I was curious, so I was like, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how far we can get,’” Borden says. “I’m thankful that it didn’t come into evidence in my case, that I didn’t need it to get my conviction.”
Emails show Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police departments’ cases through Cybercheck for free in order to demonstrate the technology. They also referenced cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high profile and that Cybercheck supposedly helped solve, without naming the cases outright or providing evidence that Cybercheck had made any difference in the investigations.
Emails obtained by WIRED from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation show that investigators were initially excited to see what information Cybercheck could provide about their cold cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. That enthusiasm seems to have helped convince other agencies to trust the company.
Gessner, from the Summit County Prosecutor’s office, says that when his agency was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked the Ohio BCI’s cybercrimes unit for an opinion. “They said, yes, it makes sense … we don’t have the technology to do this, but we’d love to have it.” County prosecutors also reached out to the SANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute didn’t “do this type of stuff.”
But even as it has withdrawn evidence that Cybercheck provided, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies whether they can do the same kind of open source locating that Global Intelligence marketed.
“We don’t want to shut doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.