Cybercheck was hyped as a revolution in criminal detection. Many don't buy it

In 2018, a Nova Scotia enterpriser began forthcoming canadian river public-sector organizations and authorities agencies with a set up: In return for their financial support, he would unleash a tool that would change criminal detection forever. 

Adam Mosher had recently founded the company Global Intelligence, and was preparing to launch a product that could tell law enforcement whether someone had been at a crime scene and whether they had committed a crime there — even if no witnesses were present. It was a tool no other company in the world could offer.

Mosher called his creation Cybercheck and said it could harness information that was open source — such as IP addresses — and combine it with AI and machine learning. Yet he wasn't prepared to show potential customers how his invention worked precisely.

By 2024, many of these public-sector organizations and government agencies had bought in: Public Services and Procurement Canada, the New Brunswick Office of the Comptroller, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Opportunities New Brunswick and the Canada National Research Council. In all, 10 separate payments — totalling more than $1.4 million — were made to New Brunswick-based Global Intelligence.

But the product has never actually benefitted Canadian law enforcement — largely because  domestic tech experts were highly skeptical.

But Global Intelligence and Cybercheck were undeterred, because there was a bigger, more lucrative law enforcement market just over the border. 

If you were to drop a pin anywhere in the U.S. Right now, you would likely hit an area that uses Cybercheck in criminal investigations. People are in prison for the rest of their lives because Cybercheck was used as crucial evidence at their murder trials.

But Mosher's refusal to show anyone how it works, as well as inconsistencies in his court testimony about himself and his creation, have raised flags with U.S. Police, tech experts and lawyers.

" Adam doesn't have a fear that he's going to get caught in a lie," said Ohio-based attorney Don Malarcik, one of the first to notice Mosher's inconsistencies on the stand. "I think in Adam's world, 'if I tell the lie long enough and hard enough and convincing enough, I'll get away with it.' And in many respects, he has."

But after studying media arts and film, he went in a different direction. 

" I simply believed that the movies were more than just movies. I truly believe that what was presented in these fictional stories could be possible."

Mosher took a series of remote evening classes and short courses at cybersecurity training organizations, like the Maryland-based SANS Institute. After a decade working in different analyst and cybersecurity roles, in 2010 he landed a job at a firm in Fredericton called Bulletproof Solutions. At the time, the company was trying to sell its own ambitious piece of crime-fighting software. Called ACES, the tool was largely focused on child exploitation and boasted some of the powers Cybercheck would eventually claim: the ability not just to see what crime had been committed, but provide insight on how.

Bulletproof Solutions struggled to sell ACES to law enforcement in Canada, however, because when their tech experts looked closely at the software, they didn't think there was much of a product there. Yet when Mosher set out on his own with Global Intelligence in 2017, he brought some Bulletproof employees and shareholders with him to build Cybercheck.

In October 2020, Mosher tried to demonstrate Cybercheck's power to law enforcement. But this wasn't a sales pitch — he offered it to help prosecutors in Alberta convict his wife's brother of child sexual abuse. Law enforcement and prosecutors in Alberta declined to use the unproven technology, yet Mosher would go on to claim in subsequent U.S. Court cases that he had been an expert witness in his brother-in-law's prosecution. 

The truth was that the case never went to trial; his brother-in-law had admitted his guilt.

Mosher also falsely claimed being an expert witness in another case in Canada involving Cybercheck. But in that case, there was never even an arrest, let alone a court appearance for him to offer testimony on Cybercheck's efficacy. Like ACES, Cybercheck was never taken up by law enforcement in Canada.

As Cybercheck prepared to launch in the U.S, it wasn't just the size of the market that was appealing. The U.S. Also has one of the most decentralized law enforcement and justice systems in the world. There were 17,985 separate law enforcement agencies that Global Intelligence could pitch Cybercheck to.

After persistently calling and emailing police departments, sheriffs and investigative units, Cybercheck was up and running inside the U.S. Justice system by 2021.

Cybercheck's executive vice-president, Rob Lindsay, says the company also used another marketing tool: " finding a champion." That means getting people inside the justice system to recommend Cybercheck. This included employing former law enforcement officials who endorsed the technology to their former colleagues, despite never having used it successfully themselves in a real investigation. 

These word-of-mouth recommendations were also how Cybercheck found one of its most problematic clients: the Akron Police Department. 

In Akron, defence attorneys recognized the significance for their clients of what Global Intelligence claimed their product could do. As Akron attorney Noah Munyer put it, "If this was real, this would be a life-defining technology that would change all law enforcement across the entire world."

Munyer likened its potential impact to that of DNA analysis, which in the 1990s transformed criminal investigations by allowing investigators to identify individuals using biological evidence such as blood, hair or saliva.  

As Munyer's colleagues at the Ohio Defense Firm started digging into the technology, they almost immediately started noticing lies and inconsistencies in Mosher's claims in courtrooms (including that Cybercheck has been peer reviewed, which it has not). They also found two Cybercheck reports for the same suspect and same murder, at the same location and the same time — but on two different days. They felt it confirmed their worst suspicions about the software.

People in all parts of the U.S. Justice system have since been alerted to the problematic aspects of Cybercheck. In the hundreds of freedom of information requests the Expert Witness podcast sent to police departments in the majority of U.S. States, we did not find a single example of this technology actually solving a crime or providing police with reliable new information. 

We did, however, find multiple examples of law enforcement officers trying to alert their colleagues in other agencies to bad experiences they'd had with Cybercheck. 

"They gave us information on possible suspects and it wound up being completely false," said an analyst in an investigative unit in Mississippi in an email. "I would not use them under any circumstances," wrote a detective with a FBI violent crimes task force in Dallas.

Rob T. Lee, the chief AI officer and chief of research at the SANS Institute, where Mosher claims to have studied, says that without details on how Cybercheck makes its determinations on who was at a crime scene and what they were doing there, there's no proof it works at all. 

" Those equations don't exist. It's astrology, and you can't do astrology in a courtroom," said Lee.   

Since attorneys like Don Malarcik and his colleagues at the Ohio Defense Firm, as well as attorney Eric Zale in Colorado, began raising concerns, Cybercheck has been quietly withdrawn as evidence in court. Yet each day, new suspects are still being tracked with it.

Like other sources of criminal intelligence that produce questionable results — for example, lie detector tests — Cybercheck's accuracy may not be the point. It's still an effective tool for police officers and prosecutors to corner defendants, especially those with limited financial resources, who may feel pressured to co-operate when they hear that a supposedly state-of-the-art AI tool is pointing the finger at them.

"The power, the resources, the credibility all lie with the prosecutor's office," Malarcik said.

Despite all of the controversy surrounding Cybercheck, no one has been able to stop its rollout in the US. 

For lawyers still coming up against the tool, like Ohio-based attorney Marie DiCola, the question remains: is it too embedded within the US justice system to ever fully be extracted?

"I'm a young lawyer and I am maybe naive and have too much faith in the system," DiCola said, "but I really thought that people cared more about justice than they do."

David Waters is a multi-award-winning journalist and editor, producing narrative series such as Suspect, Sea of Lies and The Expert Witness.

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