Uncover - S37 E4: Nerds Love Code | The Expert Witness

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Don Malarcik might finally uncover how Cybercheck works, as its creator Adam Mosher travels to Ohio to demonstrate the software to Don’s legal team and independent experts. While parts of the program appear functional, its core AI remains hidden, and Mosher refuses to provide full access or explain how it reaches conclusions that place suspects at crime scenes. His answers raise concerns about bias, and when he claims Cybercheck was peer-reviewed by a Canadian university, Don discovers the university denies any involvement. Believing this proves Mosher misled the court, Don prepares for a decisive hearing that could determine whether Cybercheck is legitimate evidence—or junk science.Binge all 9 episodes of this season on our YouTube page, or get them ad-free on CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts.A listener's guide to Uncover: Where to go next

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No, not today. Looks like people are starting to know Beneva pretty well. You're stronger with the right partner, Beneva. This is a CBC podcast. The Ohio defense firm's office looked like it had turned into a game of Tetris. Every few seconds, it seemed, another brick would fall in the form of a box of documents. Ever since Akron's courts became backlogged, the bricks were piling higher and higher without anyone being able to clear a line.

And now that Don had agreed to take on all cybercheck cases in Akron, the bricks were falling faster than ever. Each labeled in marker, cyber shit. Inside each of these boxes was a different chapter of the same story, a horrific cold case killing, leaving families and friends of the victims with unanswered grief. But then for the investigators who were stumped, for the people waiting for justice, there was finally hope, finally a breakthrough. Cybercheck was here. And And Don Milarcic just wanted it gone. In the fall of 2023, the Ohio defense team still knew very little about the inner workings of the thing. They didn't know if Cybercheck really worked or not.

All they knew from what they'd learned about what went down in Colorado and from their own run-ins with the man was that the creator of Cybercheck had serious issues with the truth. They had tried to expose these issues and share with the judge and prosecutors their findings. But when they did, nobody cared. And we just could not understand why no one cared except us. Nothing they found seemed big enough to move the needle. The prosecutors didn't seem suspicious about anything they were learning about Mosher. It was so maddening to try to understand why they didn't care because in order to believe in cyber-check,

you have to believe Adam Osier. It's the only thing that matters is his word. His credibility is the only thing that matters if we can't see the software to validate that it's accurate. So Don and Marie were doubling down on that. You believe this guy? Cool. Time to show us why.

We did everything we could to try to get access to the software. Don and Marie's defense of Philip Mendoza was one of their most high-profile cases. He was accused of having shot and killed toddler Tyree Halsell. And the Cybercheck report that pointed to Mendoza was still buried in the Tetris stack somewhere. But Mendoza's original lawyer had told him that it placed him at the crime scene at almost the exact time the fatal shots were fired.

But how had it done that? Don went to the judge and said, look, if Cybercheck is so worried about someone stealing their secret software recipe or whatever, we'll sign a protection order. So it's only our independent experts that get to peek inside it. But still, wouldn't do it. And that made me fucking incensed. Moser did offer to let Don see Cybercheck in motion and show it to him in person. But like a magician with his cards, he wasn't going to just hand him the deck.

The code and algorithms were still off limits. For now. I'm Sam Mullins. And from CBC's Uncover, this. is the expert witness. Episode 4. Nerds Love Code. In October 2023, in one of the Mendoza hearings,

Adam Mosher appeared, and he said a surprising thing. He told the court that there was no need for an expert to examine the Cybercheck Code, because it had already been independently verified by a scientific peer review study. To Don and Marie, this was a shock, because it ran completely careful. counter to what Mosier had said in the past. He had said so many times that he had never been peer reviewed. Don himself had asked Adam about this very thing the first time he came up against him in court. And Adam said, quote, no peer reviews, no.

So what's with the new story? Immediately we were like who, what, when, where, why. A peer review study is significant because it means that something has survived the scrutiny of people who really know what they're talking about. And Moser told the court that CyberChack's peer review study was carried out in the great nation of Canada by the University of Saskatchewan. So I file a motion to order Adam Mosier to identify this peer review study. And then Don waited and waited and waited.

20203 turned into 2024. Multiple haircuts happened. New Year's resolutions were conceived of, implemented and abandoned, all without Mosher producing this thing. So Don did what he often does. He lost it. He went to the judge in the Mendoza case. I said, Judge, we got to have the necessary information to have our experts intelligently,

critically examine this stuff. We have to have our experts get access to the information that the prosecution's using to convict our client. So the judge proposed a creative compromise to Don Malarsik and the prosecutors who were trying to use Cybercheck as evidence, one that all sides eventually agreed on. Adam Mosher would go to see Don, Marie, Noah, and their independent experts in Akron, and he'd bring his creation with him. was not going to turn the software over, but at least show our experts how the software functioned. It was kind of a prearranged date that nobody really wanted to go on, but we had to kind of do it for our parents kind of thing. Moser and Cybercheck were coming to Akron. It was on.

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Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking long ship with thoughtful service and culture. enrichment, on board, and on shore. Learn more at viking.com. On the morning of March 25th, Don Malarsik wasn't especially in a hurry to get to the office and greet his Canadian guest. I think we had a bet in the office. It was 50-50, whether or not he was going to be here. Don had been corresponding with Mosier long enough to know how his Monday morning promises usually play out. I didn't think there was a chance in hell. that he would show up. But Marie was the early bird to catch the worm. I was actually the only one here that morning. That morning, Marie was only weeks into her professional law career. That February,

she passed the bar and was no longer a paralegal. She was an official, full-time defense attorney at the coveted Ohio defense firm. And when the buzzer went, and she realized it was on her to entertain Mosier, She was like, of course. Don invites Adam Mosher to our office. He comes to the office. Don's not here to say hi. Marie let Mosher in. He was taller than she expected, towering over her. He was professionally dressed and had with him his life's work, which fit conveniently in his computer bag. So I greet him and he was like kind of astonishingly polite. I didn't know what to expect, but he was way more personable and excited almost in a way to be there. Marie offered him a coffee and did her best to get through the standard.

Oh, so you're from Canada, chit-chat, until eventually Don walked in. And I was shocked. He actually showed. The next person threw the door that morning was digital forensics expert, Greg Kelly. who had a spring in a step. It's not every day you get to pop the hood on something this advanced, something that claims it can do things that no one in the tech world had ever seen before.

Plus, of course, it was cool to meet its creator, who his boss thought was a total fraud. He was very polite, very personable. Greg and Mosher were directed to the room where they'd be holed up for the next few days, and they got into it. They were set up in one of our conference, rooms like all day with the door closed and not much sound coming out of it.

While the nerds were nerding, it was hard for any of the lawyers in the office to go about their usual work, knowing that the man who'd thrown a wrench into their whole business of criminal defense was bearing all just down the hallway. We were giddy. Yes, we were giddy because these guys are in it. I mean, like, in the code. The day played out like a sports match. There was the playing field, the conference.

room. And then at appropriate intervals, there would be a break in the action where the sweaty players would lumber into Don's office, the de facto dressing room, to reflect and strategize. Greg and his team would come in and it was kind of surreal. It was really kind of bizarre. I'd run in and we'd all come in here and kind of huddle and kind of hush-hosh, like, okay, what is he saying? What is he doing? They'd all crowd around and be like, what the freak is going on in there, Greg? He gave us what he said was a copy of the source code, and we just started looking at it. And it was very gracious in answering questions as we went along. But the code, the cybercheck, it's all bull, right?

Right, Greg? It was too early to tell. It was really a roller coaster for me, because I had come to my own conclusion that Adam is a fraud and cybercheck is complete nonsense. A part of Don thought that when Mosier finally showed his code, that the experts would just just be like, that's not code? That's just wingdings. I was cautiously optimistic that the fraud would be exposed, but, you know, Greg would come in to me and he would say something, well, I don't think it's all bullshit. I'm like, what are you talking about, man? Like, what do you mean? Well, it's doing this, and that's a real thing. What do you mean it's doing a real thing, Greg?

We did see software that appeared to work that gathered data and fed it into some AI environment. And I'm like, how was it doing that? And then Greg would disappear into the conference room again for another session with Mosher. This arranged date happening in Akron. Going into it, Don could not have been rooting harder against Mosier. I thought this guy's a complete fraud and I have to burn him down. That was the overarching goal. But there were breaks in the action.

Lunches, water breaks, donuts. and then the end of the day would roll around. And this weird kind of thing started to happen. He kind of wanted to stick around in our office when we were done. It was a little weird. Greg would leave and the experts were gone and we would set up a time to come tomorrow. And Adam just wanted to hang out and kind of shoot the shit a little bit.

Like we'll buy him lunch and we're bullshit. I was talking to him about non-cyber trick stuff, just, you know, Canada and this and that. you know, pleasant trees and stuff, and he was affable and normal. Greg would be looking over Mosher's shoulder, grilling him line by line. But then it would be time for a coffee run. All of a sudden he starts talking about, like, you know, personal things. We started talking about being a dad.

We both have teenage boys. And we both have some of the same struggles. And I connected with him on a human level that I didn't think was really possible. This was a confusing time for Don. Because on top of his tech standing up to his team's scrutiny, Don also had to consider that he, oh God, it's hard to say out loud, but was Don enjoying his time with Mosier? I saw the human in him. You can't see that on Zoom. I can't see it when I'm cross-examining him, but I saw it and I felt it. This is an important lesson to take with us. When you take

oppositional forces from the online world, and you put them into the real world, and make them breathe the same air and eat the same donuts. This is what happens. Connection. At a certain level, he was broken just like all of us. Had Moser's time at Ohio defense been just a day, both sides might have walked away thinking that it was a great success. But this wasn't a date. It was more of a weekend getaway. And as Greg continued in the conference room, the red flags started to come into view. One of the things that I found kind of unusual was like, we'd ask him a question, he'd give us an answer.

And then we'd ask the question again, we'd get a completely different answer. Greg started to get the sense that there were parts of the code that were off limits. We started to see kind of his bag of tricks. And as we would get close to questions that would... back the curtain, Adam would pivot, and it was incredibly frustrating. Any question you asked that tries to get below, he backtracks his proprietary, and you're like, oh yeah, okay. Nailing him down was like nailing jello to a tree. It was virtually impossible. If you're not in a room with him where you have eight hours to pin him down, it's almost impossible to pick up on those things

that he does to avoid telling the truth. He's masterful at that, better than anyone I've ever met, honestly. Leading up to his arrival in Akron, Moser had promised, quote, complete access to the cybercheck code base, which includes all machine learning models and artificial intelligence algorithms. But as Moser's time in Ohio started to wind down, did you have unfettered access to the entire codebase of Cybercheck? No. No. No. unfettered access, absolutely not. Greg felt that despite seeing hundreds of lines of code, the software piece that we looked at, there was no AI to it.

It was kind of like the beginning and the end after the AI took place. But when the AI took place, what was it doing specifically? That's the black box that we can never figure out. They could see where the meat went in, and they could see where the sausage links came out. but the middle part remained a mystery. How does he take these data points and turn them into a percentage that places people at the scene of a crime in the 90th percentile?

What connections was the AI in Cybercheck making? More importantly, what was the data upon which the AI was trained? With artificial intelligence, probably one of the most important things is understanding what data the AI is trained on. AI only knows what you show it. If you tell it that water is blue and then you show it a muddy river, it won't recognize the river as water. The same goes for the criminal cases. If all you show it is just the existing American criminal justice system and media coverage of the criminal justice system, that could present an obvious problem. If you already start from a biased standpoint of criminal cases where it's heavily weighted towards minorities more than the general population, now you potentially have an AI that's going to be biased in how it identifies potential suspects. Every single person identified by Cybercheck and then charged in Akron had been a non-white suspect with an existing criminal record. So Don really pressed motion on.

this point. Like, how did you teach this thing to weigh one suspect versus another? And Moser would say, through the 51 criminal indicators, of course. What is a criminal indicator? And some of the answers we got back were, well, you know, gang affiliation. And another answer was pornography. So you're saying that if someone views pornography, they're more likely to rob a store at gunpoint? Don was lost. Every time we would peel back a little bit of a layer, you'd get another question that would just make you go, what the fuck is he talking about? And I'd say, Adam, what do you meet criminal indicators? I mean, who came up with the list of 51 criminal indicators? And the answer was basically him.

So then I would say, well, how do you know that these criminal indicators predict a guilty person? And then he said something really weird. He said, well, the cases that I used, I knew the person was guilty. And I said, okay, Adam, tell me how you knew. Well, there was a conviction. By the time the midweek weekend getaway with Moser drew to a close, Don made clear to Adam the next step. Send me the cases you used to train your AI.

And he'd take notes, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely, Don. He would write down on his own note. book, what he's going to get back to us. And then I would get back to my office and I would send him an email saying, hey, Adam, don't forget, I need the list of the 50 cases that you input into AI to show us how you came up with criminal indicators that only predict a guilty person. Absolutely, Don, you'll have it by Monday. And I knew damn well that we were never going to get that. As Mosier disappeared back to Canada, while a part of Don still couldn't believe that he'd shown up,

there was no spinning what this had been. A big waste of time. I absolutely 1,000% believe when Adam got on the plane, flying back to Canada and leaving Akron, Ohio, he thought, nailed it. And so, whether or not Moser had created something useful to the world remained unclear. But one thing that was clear,

he had created something useful to his world. My impression was that he was just really, desperate for validation. He absolutely needed for people here in Ohio to respect him, to appreciate him, and devalitate him. In Don's opinion, Moser was after something deeper. This cyber check had become his thing, right? It was his crypto. It was his baby. And no matter how flawed it was, it was his. And no one was ever going to take that away from him. And he just wanted people to realize the good that he was trying to do. The follow-up information Moser promised Don never arrived.

The hamster wheel kept going round and round, with Moser never seeming to be held accountable, the prosecutors defending Cybercheck, and the police continuing to use it. Don was running out of options, and there was one that he couldn't put off any longer. We got to finish this dance, right? It was time for Daubert. A Daubert hearing is the final boss in the game of keeping junk science and unqualified experts away from juries. The way that it works is the defense and prosecutors make their arguments, and the judge alone makes the ultimate call on whether the new science should be allowed in court or not.

Like the first time DNA analysis was used on hairs found caught in a thief's ski mask, That had to go through a daubert. Or when latent fingerprint identification was tested on a handwritten message to catch a bank robber, had to go through a daubber. If a daubart hearing ends with a ruling in your favor of your new technology, it sets a precedent for the science in a very appealing way. But if the science doesn't pass, in this case, cybercheck would go the way of brain fingerprinting or penile lethesimography.

It would be thrown out as evidence and set a precedent for others. We wanted a dauburned hearing. We did. The problem was we couldn't really prepare for a dauburned hearing without access to the software. I was being deprived of that, and I believed I was being deprived of it because that's the only way he could perpetrate the fraud. It was risky business to stubbornly go forward with the hearing, because Don didn't know if he had anything strong enough to sway a judge. As the dauber approached, Don spent time looking back over everything he'd done to make sure there was nothing he'd missed or forgot to follow up on. And he was brought back to the question of Cybercheck's peer review, which was supposedly carried out by the University of Saskatchewan.

Pursuant to the judge's order, Moser had eventually sent over the 44-page study about his company, and Don's reaction to it was not unlike his reaction to every other document. I'm looking at these attachments and I'm printing them and they don't make any fucking sense. But one thing Don hadn't done was try to get in touch with the university itself to verify Moser's claim. So Don emails the strange document that Adam sent him to the University of Saskatchewan and was like, what is this thing? When did you do a peer review study on Cybercheck? And a day later, they came right back. Dear Donald, the email begins.

It is not correct to say it was peer-reviewed. USASC was not involved in the creation of the document, nor did we create any content for the document, nor can we say conclusively what information the company used to create it. I'm like, oh my God, we got them. We have closed all the door. Don thought that this not only proved that Mosier was a fraud, but that he had perjured himself on the stand under oath.

Don had been on a year-long quest to find something about Cybercheck that people would care about, and he finally had it. Not only would this help him win the daubart, he had something that would take Moser down. There's nowhere for Adam Moser to escape now. We had him. Don frantically emailed his colleagues across the aisle. Adam Mosier lied under oath.

If Cybercheck does what Moser claims it does, why does he have to lie about it? With each typed word, he could see the finish line getting closer. He'd done it, he felt. He'd won. And now this Daubert hearing couldn't happen soon enough. Fuck this, we've been playing around for long enough. We've been doing this dance for 11 months.

Let's go. The prosecutors have. had parried everything Dawn had put to them, but this time would be different. Don was ready for any scenario, for every possibility, except for the one that actually played out. And I was like, oh shit. That's coming up on the expert witness. And immediately, it's like sirens going off, alert, alert. There's definitely some funny monkey business going on here.

There it is. phone up. You've been listening to the expert witness from CBC's uncover. The series is produced by RAW for CBC. The show was written and hosted by me, Sam Mullins. Our producer is David Waters. The series was developed and reported by David Waters and Jessica Hatcher. Our editor is Veronica Simmons.

Coordinating producer is Emily Canal. Mix by Garrett Teeteman. At Raw, Deborah Duggen is the head of podcasts. The production executive is Letitia Kizza-Souza. Special thanks to Emma Wood and Olivia Bhutan. Additional audio from 19 News, 3 News, News 5 Cleveland, CBC News, WKYC, WSO-C-TV, and WBRZ. At CBCC, the executive producers

are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and RF Naurani is the director of CBC Podcasts. Tune in next week for an all-new episode of The Expert Witness. Or you can listen ahead to the full series now by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts or by subscribing to the CBC True Crime channel on YouTube. Links in the description. If you're looking for more investigations, check out CBC's The Con.

Each season focuses on stories about scammers and con artists. It's a podcast all about exposing the art of deception. Find the con wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca.com.