Uncover - S37 E6: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | The Expert Witness

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Cybercheck has spread across the U.S. through aggressive cold-email marketing, word of mouth, and partnerships with law enforcement agencies eager to solve cold cases. Journalist Todd Feathers uncovers questionable claims in Cybercheck reports, including supposed access to dark web accounts and the ability to retroactively place phones at crime scenes decades earlier. Despite producing few verifiable results, respected agencies like Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation still promoted the tool to other departments, helping expand its reach. Is there anyone willing to put this tech under the necessary scrutiny? Maybe in West Texas. 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

Life by the ocean means embracing the fog as it rolls in, when the whole city goes fuzzy, and nothing is sharp or precisely defined. While you're here, you too might fall in love with misty Halifax mornings. Fog can muffle the noise of your expectations, help you focus on the moment right in front of you. It can give you a whole new perspective if you're willing to let it cloud your judgment.

This is a CBC podcast. The Ohio defense firm had slayed the dragon. They'd chased the cybercheck raccoon off the porch with a broom. Or so they thought. The body of the beast still lived, somewhere in Canada. And from there, it could send out more appendages, slithering silently into the U.S. criminal justice system, looking for traction. But how does that actually work?

When you've invented a cutting-edge never-before-seen AI tool that's going to change crime fighting forever, how do you get the word out? And if you're not prepared to show anyone how it works, how do you sell it to the police? We used public records requests to get a lot of communication between the company that makes cyber check and police departments. we saw through that Cybercheck's marketing operation. Wired reporter Todd Feathers was also curious how Cybercheck was sold to cops. And fortunately, if you do a freedom of information request from 2021 onwards for emails containing the word Cybercheck, there's a lot you can learn. Cybercheck, it turns out, are nothing, if not prolific, emailers. Reading the company's marketing materials, it had, you know, it was all blue.

and white, big, bold fonts, and made some claims about what the technology could do. But there really was not a lot of technical detail about the technology and very little information about who was involved with the company. Often these vague emails seem to have been sent out completely cold, just to see who in the department might be interested in getting a free cyber check demo. But they weren't just spamming people indiscriminately. When you take a step back and look at which police departments they were reaching out to and who was getting back to them, a pattern starts to emerge.

A profile of jurisdiction where Cybercheck seemed to have the most success. From the Mississippi Delta all the way through, you know, upstate New York. After Eric Zale had successfully driven Cybercheck from a small town in Colorado, he started to look for other places it was being used so that he could reach out to the defense attorneys there and give them a heads up. In places like Chattanooga. Which is a small town in eastern Tennessee,

and they had a case involving cyber check on a homicide. And I was like, hey, man, we need to talk. Like, I have a ton of information. I have permission for my client to share this information to help other people. This guy is a griff. And the lawyer was like, oh, it seems weird to me. I was wondering about that.

Oh, well. And then just crickets. So then he'd call another lawyer up against Cybercheck in New York State. Same thing. Small town, notoriously poor. I have all this information to help. Let's talk. Same thing.

Just crickets. Zale couldn't believe it. Personally, if I ever get a phone call from someone and they're like, I have information because I think this thing that's your country. cases involved with, and I've done all the work, I'd probably be on the first plane out there, but that's just me. Why were all these places so disinterested in scrutinizing this thing? Zayle has a theory.

What I believe Cybercheck was doing was purposely hiding in small towns and jurisdictions, taking advantage of people with limited defense resources to prey on uneducated police officers, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. But was this true? How far had its tentacles reached? I'm Sam Mullins, and from CBC's Uncover, this is the expert witness. Episode 6, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

When journalist Todd Feather set out to discover how far Cybercheck had spread, following the trail of their cold call emails took him to some unexpected places. We got some insight into, some of the weirder cases that Cybercheck has worked on. We found out that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife had been using Cybercheck. The Department of Fish and Wildlife? Don't tell me.

They were using Cybercheck to track endangered species, like to see if the Northern Spotted Owl had pinged off any local wireless routers or smart fridges. No? What then? To apparently truck down animal smugglers. Animal smugglers. That makes more sense.

They were looking into a man that they suspected of smuggling animals in wildlife from Mexico to the U.S. So they got Moser to do his thing. And Cybercheck came back with a report that identifies this man. We only get his first name. The rest is redacted. This is the man's phone number. These are his email addresses. And these confidence scores like we are 97.3% confident that this email address belongs to this man.

But then it gets weird. Cybercheck claimed to have trailed the animal smuggling corners of the dark web and come up with some secret profiles that matched up with this guy. And this is a huge red flag to me. I'm not aware of tools that can track down dark web users. And not only claim to track them down, but also... Give you their username and password, which is what Cybercheck is doing here. And listener, tell the children to go play outside.

Turn down the volume on your mother-in-law's hearing aid and buckle up because have we got some usernames and passwords for you? I don't know if I can say them on the podcast, but for example, on one forum, his username is horny horsecock and his password is allegedly pigeon cum 6996. And on another one, his username is supposed to be elephant cock with the password elephant cunt. Maybe animal smugglers did use those passwords, but I am very suspicious that Cybercheck has cracked the dark web as completely and thoroughly, as they seem to be suggesting in

his presentation. Anyway, Cybercheck didn't seem to get much traction in the world of animal smuggling in California. But as Todd Feathers continued to follow the trail of Cybercheck's email marketing campaign across America, this animal smuggler anecdote wasn't the only time he encountered new claims that pushed the limits of plausibility. And there were others with far greater consequences for those identified in the reports. One of the things that might have made cybercheck claims seem so conceivable to cops and prosecutors is that we all understand what the device in our pocket is up to, at least vaguely. When it's on, we know that it's in constant communication with cell towers, and it's asking

us which Wi-Fi's we want to join. And it's common knowledge that lots of these apps that we're using are always spinning plates and updating, shedding our private information like it's an insatiable gossip. If you have 100 apps, you might have 100 user agreements that you didn't read. Do you want to turn on your location for the? this app? This app tracks your movements. Is that cool? Is it okay if we share everything you do with whoever we want and we make billions of dollars off of, well, your lives? We all sort of accept that our phones are hemorrhaging our data every second of every day. But when did that start? Was the flip phone that I had in my dorm room at university shedding data in 2005? And what about

before that. One morning in 2003, in a small town in upstate New York, two people walking down a path discovered the body of 20-year-old Megan McDonald. She was seen at some parties

two nights before, where she was surrounded by friends, and had left at a reasonable hour at around midnight to go smoke some wheat. But she didn't show up to her serving job the next afternoon. When the pathologist inspectors inspected her body, he came to the conclusion that she'd been killed by a brutal, blunt force

attack. It was an extremely high-profile case. Dateline did two stories about it. Attractive young white woman, daughter of a police officer, beloved by everyone who knew her, killed brutally. In the eyes of the police, there were multiple suspects. All might have interacted with her that night. But a whole year went by with no arrests, and then 10 years went by. Her story was constantly revisited by the media. Rewards were offered for new information, but the case went ice cold. 2023 was the 20th anniversary of her death. It was also the year that Cybercheck was emailing police departments, basically saying, got any cold cases that need solving? And this is the story of one of those departments. Yeah, that one blows my mind. Todd Feathers again, the journalist from Wired.

I think when you just state exactly what Cybercheck says they have done in that case, it raises questions more than maybe like anything else that they're uncovered. New York State began receiving assistance from Cybercheck in January 2023, just a few months before Dawn would catch his first Cybercheck case in Akron. And before long, a Cybercheck report said it was able to place the cellular devices of Megan MacDonald and her ex-boyfriend Edward Hawley, quote, at key locations on the night of the homicide. Cybercheck says that New York State Police were able to use the cyber check tool to identify the cyber profiles that were the scene where a body was found 20 years ago

based on a cell phone, a cell phone from 20 years ago. In 2003, the year that Megan was killed, the Nokia 11th, was the most popular phone in the U.S. And this thing was tight. You could make calls. You could text friends. You could play snake. But it wasn't so great for pinging off Wi-Fi routers

because not many people even had Wi-Fi routers in 2003. My cell phone wasn't pinging wireless networks 20 years ago. But if the prosecutors were suspicious of the claims the cyber check was making with its report, they weren't showing it. I have never, in all of my research, and I asked a lot of experts, found anybody who could explain where that information would have been recorded on the open or dark web and is then publicly accessible 20 years later. I just am not convinced that it exists.

The felony complaint against Edward Hawley in April 2023 said that this information provided by Cybercheck corroborated the investigative timeline. And unfortunately for Edward Hawley, Cybercheck wasn't asked to show where this information came from. The fact that it said it seemed to be enough. In January 2024, he was indicted by a grand jury for murder. He spent over a year in a jail cell protesting his innocence. Eventually, prosecutors chose not to present the Cybercheck evidence in his trial. And in 2006, he was cleared of the murder charges. Life by the ocean means embracing the fog as it rolls in when the whole city goes fuzzy and nothing is sharp or precisely defined. While you're here, you too might fall in

love with misty Halifax mornings. Fog can muffle the noise of your expectations, help you focus on the moment right in front of you. It can give you a whole new perspective if you're willing to let it cloud your judgment. Discover Halifax. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide and the places desperate people go

when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. As CyberChack continued to spread to other states in the U.S., its success seemed to follow the simple template of the cold email campaign. Enticing sales pitch offer a freebie, target certain markets. But there was an even more effective way of getting customers by using the most effective sales tool of all. The best way to sell anything, really. Word of mouth.

Cybercheck's marketing operation really relied on having one customer recommend them to another customer and put them in touch. So wait, if customers were recommending CyberTech to others, that must mean that it was working, that it was making a positive difference in cases, right? Well, to really understand how it spread through word of mouth, I need to tell you a story that runs parallel to every everything that I've told you about so far. A story that was happening right under Don and Marie and Noah's noses all along in Ohio. I need to tell you about the Ohio BCI. So BCI is the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Marie DeCola of the Ohio defense firm.

They come in and testify at a hearing and say, I am a scientist, a forensic scientist, and I analyzed this on this date, and it came back with this. and that's what it was. And it's normally very just kind of black and white. Or at least that's how it's supposed to be. Because the BCI are not a bunch of rubs. These aren't the uneducated police officers from Eric Zales theory. When it comes to forensics and criminal investigations in Ohio,

the BCI are the best at what they do and are supposed to be the gold standard. The BCI didn't want to participate in. in our series. But they were required to show us some of their email communications mentioning the word Cybercheck under the freedom of information requests. So we know that the BCI's relationship with Cybercheck began in 2022 through word of mouth when someone at the Akram PD recommended it to them. The agency works on literally hundreds of unsolved murders all over Ohio. So when Cybercheck offered a three-case-free trial, not unlike a drug dealer giving you the first rock for free, a BC supervisor was pumped and said, quote,

We all have a dozen cases that we want to be part of the complementary case report. It was hard to choose just three, smiley face. This is one thing that Cybercheck really has going for it. America has a lot of unsolved murders, so the offer to get some free help is hard to ignore. So Cybercheck gets these three test cases from the BCI, and it seems like it gets to work. There's some back and forth, but then something happens in mid-July. A special agent in charge of the Technical Investigations Division asks a colleague in an email, are they still ghosting you on this, or have you heard back from Cybercheck?

We're in the process of obtaining a substantial contract with them. And the colleague writes back, I've been fully ghosted. A substantial contract is a bit surprising to read about because in the emails up to then, they don't ever seem to get any positive results. And when the special agent finally gets a hold of someone at Cybercheck to be like, what gives, where's our free reports?

The Cybercheck guy explains that he's been told to hold off on sending updates until the contract is taken care of. Hmm. I guess that first rock wasn't for free. So did the BCI ever pony up the taxpayers' money and sign a contract with Cybercheck? Let me read you an email sent from Cybercheck to the special agent in charge, whose name is Mark Kohler, which happens to be the thirstiest email I've ever read in my life. Quote, I'm so happy that we are now officially partners.

I can't tell you how excited our team is to have the... the Ohio BCI on board. I really want to take a moment and thank you for all of your hard work and effort in getting us across the line. I can't imagine how much time you've spent doing my job for me. You're one great salesman. I am very grateful to have you as our champion. We could not have hit the jackpot any harder.

Thank you for being such a wonderful partner for us, Mark. I can't wait for us to get us. get started and deliver on our mutual goal, getting justice. If there's anything you need, you have my direct line and I'll always pick up, day or night. Don't forget, I'm the BCI's number one champion too. Take care. Have a lovely weekend and let's get started. Wow, I need a cigarette. Someone get that email a cold shower. So this, quote, substantial contract between Cybercheck and the BCI was inked, or more likely,

docu-signed around July of 2023. To orientate us with our other Ohio story, this is right around the time that Don Malarsik is first emailing the Summit County Prosecutor's Office, accusing Adam Mosher of lying under oath in one of their cases. I don't know if BCI heard about that or cared about that, but the honeymoon period between the BCI and Cybercheck seem to end within that first month. The first issue was the email addresses, the ones used to identify the cyber profiles of suspects. Some of the early cybercheck reports that BCI got back included email addresses that Gmail and Yahoo both claimed had never existed

in the first place. This email issue sounded very familiar to me because Don Malarsik caught something like this in his very first cyber check case for Javion Rankin. All this stuff about cyber profiles and emails, and the emails don't even really make sense. I'm talking to Javion and I'm showing him the report and I'm saying, dude, is this your email address? It's like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. If you remember, there was a Yahoo email in that case where the Yahoo had an extra O in it. Okay, this is obviously not my client. But when the BCI reached out to Mosier to question their janky email addresses,

Moser was like, oh, no, they're totally real. You just need to ask Google and Yahoo if these emails existed in a certain way. And then this was followed by a long email chain. Okay, can you tell us how we're supposed to do it? I'll have it to you today. Hey, just checking in on the thing. Did you not get it? We're not seeing it.

I put it in the drive. Do we need a password for that? It should be there. Well, we're saying that it isn't. So if you're one of the people on these email hell chains from the BCI, would you recommend this thing? This thing that did not seem to be delivering any goods at all? Because they would recommend it.

The BCI had relationships with every police department in the state. Later that very same month, in email exchange, shows a BCI official passing along. cyber checks digits to the BCI's friends at Cleveland Homicide. Just like they had done for Grandview Heights Police Department, the Ohio Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, Coyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, Belmont County Sheriff's Office, all now presumably trying out this unproven AI criminal detection tool in their investigations. The BCI's issues continue to appear in these emails over the coming months.

There's questions about the claim Cybercheck is making about its software, concerns about the fact it doesn't retain data, people wonder if the data would stand up to scientific scrutiny, and one person says that it seems like AI itself is writing some of Cybercheck's literature with all the word salad explainers. But it's in March 2024 when perhaps the most telling email exchange happens between two BCI colleagues. Quote,

I have fielded calls from the Summit County Prosecutor, Grandview Heights, Columbus, and GBI recently about Cybercheck. It seems we're not unique in our quest to try to validate the data in the reports. The other writes back, all of this just gets stranger and stranger. This was around the time that Mosier went to Akron

to show Don and his team the coat. So it's interesting to know, that the prosecutors were simultaneously on their own quest to validate cyber checks data. And I'm just spitballing here, but maybe they should have done that sooner, like before they used it to put two men in prison for life. The Summit County Prosecutor's Office, in their statement to us, did confirm that it reached out to BCI at this time. Yet after March 2024, they didn't stop prosecuting suspects using

Cybercheck. Their final prosecution was not dropped until December 2024. And according to defense attorneys, neither the BCI or the Summit County prosecutors told the people charged with murder that they were having these doubts about Cybercheck's, quote, validity at this time. Here's Marie DeCola of the Ohio defense firm. If there's any concern with the validity of Cybercheck, they would, tell, or I think they would have to tell at least the prosecutors, and the prosecutors are absolutely ethically obligated to share that information with us. Did that happen? If they had concerns about its validity and we didn't know about it, I think that would be a problem. That's really,

I mean, I would be surprised because in my head, see, it just keeps going farther and further. Like, in my had BCI is a legitimate and trustworthy, you know, entity because it's everything I've seen them do is just so black and white. It's DNA and it's evidence. And I guess maybe I'm super, I'm a young lawyer and I maybe am naive and I have maybe too much faith in the system. It's like, what this has definitely made me realize is I really thought that people cared more about justice than they do. That's been a, I. opening experience, and I guess better that I got it, you know, before I even became a lawyer. Yeah.

The BCI did not respond to us, but they did respond to Todd Feathers when he reached out for comment in mid-20204. And they were pretty clear about their experience. They said, quote, The BCI became aware of Cybercheck through the Akron Police Department and began engaging with a company in late 2020, early 202. BCI submitted four cases to Cybercheck and received some positive results during this proof of concept testing. BCI entered into a trial period with Cybercheck to include work on 15 additional cases. However, BCI has not received results on any of the cases, and some of the leads produced haven't panned out. Due to the lack of leads that have been produced, BCI has no intentions of

entering into another contract with the company, end quote. So no results on any cases, and they were recommending Cybercheck anyway. When it comes to the story of the spread of unproven AI technology across the U.S., the tale of the BCI of a statewide elite organization embracing Cybercheck is not unique to Ohio. Their counterparts in the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, have been using Cybercheck since as far back as 2022. And their equivalent in Georgia signed their own contract in July 24. And if these respected and influential institutions are willing to embrace this unproven tool, then was there anywhere that would actually scrutinize it?

We might have found a tiny bit of hope in a corner of West Texas. So whenever new science comes out, this is what you've got to do. 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 Tiedman. At Raw, Deborah Duggan is the head of podcasts. The production executive is Letitia Kiddza-Souza. Special thanks to Emma Wood and Olivia Bhutan. Additional audio from 19 News, 3 News, News 5 Cleveland, CBC News, WKYC, WSOCTV, and WBRZ. At CBC, the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and Arif Nurani 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.