Uncover - S37 E9: Behind the Curtain | The Expert Witness

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Sam Mullins looks into Cybercheck’s claimed “success stories” and finds they offer little proof of the tool’s reliability. One defense attorney benefited from a Cybercheck report that actually pointed to an alternative suspect, helping reduce charges against her client, while a prosecutor and paid Cybercheck consultant praised the technology despite never using it in court. Journalists’ extensive public records requests and outreach to law enforcement revealed widespread skepticism, failed tests, and unverifiable claims, with no confirmed example of Cybercheck solving a case. The episode also highlights the conviction of Salah Maddi, where Cybercheck testimony appeared to influence the jury despite weak corroborating evidence, raising concerns that unproven AI may have contributed to wrongful convictions. Ultimately, the investigation concludes that Cybercheck has consumed investigators’ time, influenced prosecutions, and spread widely—despite a lack of transparency or clear evidence that it reliably delivers justice.Find out which season of Uncover should be your next listen here.

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Reporting this story, it's often felt like if you drop a pin anywhere in America, there's a good chance that nearby will be a police department using cybercheck. And this has been hard to square, because during our reporting, we've heard people sing the same song. over and over again. A song with unique verses, but when it comes to the chorus,

everyone sings in unison, Cybercheck ain't it. Have the people struggle to see the value in it? The people are disbelievers, because generally the defense attorneys. Yeah, yeah. That make the comments in the media, and the media carry.

So, yeah, that's easy to find. This, of course, is Adam Mosher from one of our interviews with him in 2025. And if he's right, then where are the success stories? If we're only hearing half of the story, where is this party where everyone is high-fiving about cyber check that we weren't invited to? I put this to Mosier. We really want to find law enforcement that are like, Cybercheck gave us the tip that helped us

catch this person. Listen to me, pound that table. desperate was I to learn a new angle, a new wrinkle. The people behind the curtains using this data that are seeing every possible value in that data to move a case forward that are behind the curtain. And they're going to stay behind the curtain until they can see their passionate case through. Adam Mosher and the Cybercheck team gave us a bunch of names of those from behind the curtain.

We contacted all of them. And out of all the names, three people said they talked to us. So we went behind the curtain to hear what they had to say. I'm Sam Mullins, and from CBC's Uncover, this is the expert witness. Episode 9. The people behind the curtain. You guys, listen, I'm not technologically savvy. The first person behind the curtain we called was Linda. And you hear us clear?

Oh, God, that's so much better. Okay. My name is Linda Malick, and I am a criminal defense attorney in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, which is a little city that's located very close to Akron, Ohio. When we asked Moser to put us in touch with people who would sing Cybercheck's praises, literally the last genre of person I expected to be hooked up with was a criminal defense attorney from the state of Ohio. I do criminal defense work, and I have a criminal defense law firm. I've been doing this for 24 years.

Linda's cyber check journey follows a lot of the familiar beats we've heard from other defense attorneys. She took a case where a young man was accused of multiple first-degree felonies, all of which he denied, and everything proceeds normally until the prosecutors send over the evidence against her client. The discovery was in excess of 100 pages. So there's a lot to read through. There's always little keys in these reports that tell me things. And there was an excerpt in the reports that prompted my eyebrow to raise. There was a Snapchat picture that the detective decided to send up to a company called Cybercheck.

There was a mention in discovery of Cybercheck being used in the investigation. But in the files that she received, there was no Cybercheck report present. When attorneys send discovery, they get all of the evidence in the prosecutor's possession. That's what is supposed to happen. So Linda's like, it seems like you guys ran a report and it's not here. Send that over, please? You wouldn't know this, but in doing the work that I do, anytime an officer or a detective downplays a piece of information, that caused me to want it more. But they wouldn't send over the mysterious report. I had to over and over again request this information that I was not receiving. And I kept saying, I want to see this report. I want to see this report.

Eventually, they relented. Finally, a report was produced, and a cybercheck was on the front of it, and it showed an alternate suspect. They ran a cybercheck report that affirmatively placed someone, not her client, but an alternative suspect at the scene of the crime. And that it was actually ran twice. So when I received this, I was very taken back. And this is where Linda's cybercheck story becomes the inverse of other defense attorneys we know. In Don Malarsik and Eric Zales' cases, the report was incriminating for their client. But in Linda's case, the report appeared to be exonerating.

So instead of being compelled to disprove Cybercheck's legitimacy, she found herself in the position of wishing and hoping that Cybercheck was legitimate, and indeed was the cutting-edge tool it was claiming to be. I wanted to call and talk to Adam Moser, the founder of Cybercheck. check and speak to him about it. This had to have made Moser happy. I mean, finally, a defense attorney not trying to ruin him. Adam has a little bit of an accent because he's from Canada, so that was very interesting

to me. And, you know, when I asked him about his company, he described it as it relies on the data that is residing somewhere in the universe, somewhere on the internet. Yep, that sounds like our Adam. And it was very hard for me to understand. But I understand it much better now, even though I don't understand it fully. Moser was successful in convincing Linda that Cybercheck was a very real tool and that the report the police ran in this case should be treated as accurate.

The upshot of all this is that Linda was able to go to the judge and be like, The prosecution ran this very accurate test, which pointed to someone other than my client, and then they withheld the report. And the judge was not happy. She was not happy at all. So from there, Linda was able to get all the charges against her client reduced to a single misdemeanor for possession of marijuana. The end. But wait, isn't it odd that Moser pointed us toward this story?

And to Linda? We want to hear about Cybercheck's biggest successes. And this is definitely a success for Linda, in so far. far as her role as defense attorney. But what are we to make of it from Cybercheck's perspective? Cybercheck's whole business model hinges on its ability to be useful to the people behind the curtain trying to strengthen their cases. But from the cops and prosecutors' perspective in this success story, doesn't it sound like by just running a Cybercheck report at all, you risk totally messing up a whole case? Onward.

Good morning. Anne-Marie Schubert. I am former district attorney for Sacramento County, which is in California. The next big success story that Adam hooked us up with belonged to Anne-Marie, another lawyer. Anne-Marie is a big deal in legal circles because long before she got involved with Cybercheck, she was on the prosecution team in one of the biggest cases of all time. Starting around mid-70s, California had a prolific serial rapist, serial killer, dead, the Golden State Killer. What was so remarkable about the Golden State Killer case was that after decades of failure,

the investigators had their big breakthrough by trying something completely new. In the fall of 2017, the idea was presented to me that, let's see if we can figure out who the bad guy is by tracing his family trees, basically. his ancestry. And so that was a kind of a novel approach to crime fighting. It was the first of its real kind in a criminal case. They built a DNA profile of the killer from an old crime scene, and they matched the profile with the people listed on a DNA website who shared the same great-great-grandfather as the killer. So a big family tree was constructed, and from there, the investigators narrowed it down, like in a game of guess who, and ruled people,

out until there was just one person left who couldn't be ruled out. And ultimately, we were able to identify him and then he was arrested in April of 2018. It was obviously a really big deal, not just because he was identified and arrested, but people had waited 40-something years for this to happen. They gave something new a chance, and they were rewarded. They made history. So in terms of, you know, did the Golden State Killer kind of impact me in my view on technology 100%.

Enter a new new technology. So Cybercheck does this demo for me, and I was so blown away by its power. They're using open source information. Why hasn't somebody else thought about this? And the thing that I was fascinated with, particularly with Cybercheck, is there's a lot of similarities to the work we did on the Golden State Killer.

We were innovative. We used a tool that had not yet been used in law enforcement. Listen, we got all these crimes that need to be solved, many violent, many murders, many rapes, kidnappings. If we can apply a technology that can help move those cases forward, why would we not do that? But the obvious thing to point out here is that Cybercheck is not like the modern forensic DNA genealogy that caught the Golden State killer. Its track record is much more spotty as a technology. Actually, it's not even spotty, because to be spotty, one must have spots or moments in which it demonstrably works and is useful. Moser hooked us up with Amory to convince us that there's people who really love Cybercheck.

And you know what? On that front, our conversation is a success. I do believe she loves Cybercheck. But by my count, there are three problems with her love. Problem one, she's never used it for a case. She's just had a demo. In terms of the demo, it was the basic overview. They give a basic concept of how it works. Problem two. She doesn't know the specifics of how it works.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you I understand everything that Cybercheck does. I'm not an expert in AI. I'm just still learning how to use chat GTP. And problem number three, and this is the big one. She's paid by cyber check to love it. I mean, they became a client, honestly, just like a month or so, a couple months ago. And what does that work entail? Working with other law enforcement to try to help them understand the tool.

Sounds an awful lot like vouching. Yeah, I mean, vouching is, yeah, I believe in this. tool, I guess, if that's, but I also want to guide people, whether it's law enforcement, what's police officers, whether it's prosecutors. How do we educate people? How do we show people that cyber check is the future? The opportunities for cybercheck will only grow and grow and grow. So, to review, of the two people that Moser told us to talk to so far, one told us a story about cybercheck messing up an entire criminal investigation, and the other is a paid spokesperson for Cybercheck.

This wasn't what we were hoping for. We were hoping for people behind the curtain who could speak to Cybercheck's efficacy. The list of contacts that Moser gave us included law enforcement officers and prosecutors from all over the U.S., all of whom are actively using Cybercheck. When we mentioned our list to Anne-Marie,

she told us she'd be surprised if any of them would talk to us. What I know from our profession is that those are cases that are pending, right? That's the challenges. Law enforcement is going to be very cautious. What she said seemed to be true. We emailed 17 different active law enforcement officials from cyber checks, people behind the curtain list. Sixteen of them would not talk to us.

But one did. So I only had the one experience, which is an investigation that was done by the Boynton Beach Police Department. Matri Tanakotu, Assistant State Attorney, 15th Judicial Circuit in West Palm Beach, Florida. Two groups of individuals had been feuding back and forth. And on this specific day, a group of them drives by the other group and kind of sprays the car with bullets and takes off. Investigators were able to obtain some clothing and firearms that were discarded by one of the parties. And they were able to pull DNA off the items and get a match. Does that mean he's...

a shooter or does that mean at some time in the past he handled this firearm or somebody took his gun or whatever. The problem with DNA evidence is that you can't put a timestamp on it. Enter a timestamp. So Boyne Beach Police had done a test case. So this was a test case I did with Cybercheck, that they were able to see the presence of their online persona through their software that showed consistent with them being in the area at the time that the items were discarded. This kind of created an ability for us to use cell phone evidence non-traditionally, I guess. But that sort of, as far as Cybercheck, made it in this case. Because as soon as the defendant heard that the cops had his DNA and were using this new Cybercheck thing.

The person took a plea. I would say it definitely changed the game in terms of them thinking the only evidence was that their DNA was left behind on an item. It actually showed that there was something that suggested. They were in the area at the time that the item was. was dropped. Cybercheck didn't come up with any new names or leads. It was used to strengthen the suspicions of the cops. Explaining what Cybercheck could do in theory seemed to be enough to get the outcome

they wanted. But if the police in Boynton Beach were impressed with what Cybercheck had done for them on their freebie, they had a funny way of showing it. And to my knowledge, Boiton Beach didn't sign on with a contract after that. and I don't know of any other prosecutor in my office who has used it. Why did Boyden Beach not sign a contract with Cybercheck after getting a result in this case? We tried to reach out to them to ask, but they wouldn't speak to us. And this experience was far from unique.

During the production of this podcast, we reached out to hundreds of law enforcement officers who've been involved in investigations where we know they tried Cybercheck at some point in the last few years. We reached out to officers from California, Oregon, Minnesota, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Colorado, Ohio, Washington, Texas, South Dakota, New York, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Illinois. None of them would tell us of one single positive experience they had solving cases with the software, which is not to say they didn't have any. They might have. They just wouldn't talk to us about them. But we discovered that they have been talking to each other.

We wanted to sneak into the party where everyone is talking about Cybercheck without us. So we did our own version of open source research to try to crash it. We sent Freedom of Information Act or FOIA requests to the majority of sheriff's departments, investigative units, district attorneys and local police departments where we heard Cybercheck was being used. We asked for every email with the word cybercheck. Some ignored our requests. Some sent us information so heavily redacted, it was eligible. Some said they would not supply us with information because of active cases.

Some denied using cybercheck. And one person refused to send us information because our associate producer on this podcast lives in the great nation of Wales and they didn't like that. What the heck, man? give whales a chance. But from the ones who did comply, a story emerges. In January 2024, on a nationwide police forum called Cloving, an officer in Massachusetts who'd been approached by Cybercheck asked the chat if anyone had ever heard of them.

An officer from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Special Victims Unit replies, we did a demo with them using a missing juvenile exigent case, and it wound up being completely false. They wasted our time. An officer in New Jersey chimes in. They weren't able to do anything for me. Another officer in Aurora, Colorado,

reports a time where Cybercheck stubbornly kept pushing a suspect that investigators were certain should be ruled out. When he pushed back to Cybercheck, they insisted they were right. They, quote, came up with a scenario where, it was a gang initiation thing when the two people in question were from opposite gangs.

On a completely different police forum from February 2024 called Blue Badges, a detective post, we need to have a conversation about cybercheck. I am concerned this company is duping a large amount of fellow law enforcement agencies and negatively affecting criminal investigations. Then someone with actual cybercheck experience rights,

In reviewing their report, it was at worst completely made up, at best, illegally obtained from a residential router, which we could not confirm because they refused to offer any further information. Another FOIA request shows that on March 5, 2024, the chief investigator at the office of the district attorney in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, emailed local law enforcement. In my opinion, in reviewing their information, it appears that it is at best impossible to verify and at worst completely false. In exploring their website and publications, I've not seen any information consistent with what I've learned from the forensic agencies with a proven track record. Please proceed with extreme caution if contacted, and I would recommend not moving forward

with any business with them as their reputation and past inconsistencies are already documented and would be an issue at court. Freedom of information acts is one thing, but when you just take one blurb out of an email chain for three months and you just take one blurb, it's easy to paint a narrative around that. Yeah. Mosier, by this point, knows all too well about what a journalist can learn through FOIA requests.

You mentioned you don't like freedom of information. For that reason. Which obviously is ironic because you are, you love intelligence. Yes. So can you talk about sort of FOIA and your relationship with it? Yeah, FOIA in general, we're always under them. Everybody's always requesting stuff and from our clients and things like that.

And, you know, it comes with the, you know, if it's a hit piece, they're going to take out that one sentence that says, you know, Cybercheck sucks. Right, yeah. So it's just, it comes with the territory. Yeah. You know, thick skin, you've got to let it roll off your back. because if you let it fester, then you grow paranoid about it, then everything's a problem. So, in anticipation of someone, anyone, or one particular person in Nova Scotia, accusing us of just cherry-picking the negative, I say,

I would have genuinely loved to have found a positive testimonial about Cybercheck. Like, I'm making a narrative podcast here. How great of a left turn would it have been if after all of our reporting, some homicide detective came to us and said, if it wasn't for Cybercheck, this family in our community never would have found justice, or Cybercheck was instrumental in this investigation. That would have really given me something to work with.

I love twists. Twists are the lifeblood of my industry. But alas, in the returns from our foias and from our conversations with the officers who would talk to us but only anonymously, we didn't find one single example of a law enforcement officer saying Cybercheck made a positive difference in their case. So if it ever made the difference in solving a crime that could not have been solved otherwise,

law enforcement agencies would not speak to us about it. At first, we thought that the authorities weren't talking to us about Cybercheck because of the timing of the cases. Adam Mosher and Anne-Marie Schubert told us that the people using cybercheck, most likely had the software linked to an ongoing investigation. And everyone knows you can't talk about pending cases. But now I think no one talked to us for a different reason. Put most simply by an officer in one of these forums we read. Quote, there's just a hesitancy of some of these places to kind of admit that they probably got scammed out of quite a bit of

money. Professional reputation and pride is important. credibility is important. You have to remember, most if not all of these law enforcement officers are going to find themselves on the stand at some point or another. And questions about judgment are germane and relevant to almost any decision that a law enforcement officer makes in a criminal case. So if there are questions about their judgment, that's going to be fodder for cross-examination. It's embarrassing to admit you made a mistake. And as Don points out, sometimes a mistake can't be fixed. The other part of this also that we can't lose sight of is prosecutors are trying to protect convictions where they put Adam Mosier on the stand.

So it's this domino effect of making this small concession that, hey, judge, we made a mistake. We came into this with good intentions. We thought that Mr. Mosier made a good sales pitch, and we believed him, and we were wrong. That simple concession could legitimately undermine and should legitimately undermine convictions in the Black case and the Mottie case. That's a real consequence. But do they really want to unscramble the eggs of those convictions Cybercheck helped secure? After all, just because Moser may have lied about XYZ doesn't necessarily mean that Cybercheck doesn't work. In the majority of the cases that we've looked into where Cybercheck's,

was used in some way, the majority of them ended with guilty pleas or convictions based on the strength of other evidence after cybercheck was dropped. Philip Mendoza, he of the duplicate cybercheck reports in Akron, pled guilty. Deshaun Coleman and Eric Ferry arrested in the shooting death of Kajuan Harrison, guilty. Martel King, arrested for shooting and killing Jemir Harris, guilty. Dier Rapp. Bobby Lee Bell, Antonio Miller, Mohamed Rito. So I understand when people say, you know, he was guilty who gives a shit? Because the people that Adam Mosier got involved with were easy to dislike. And most of them were probably guilty of the murders that they were charged with.

A number of them have pled guilty. Other individuals have been convicted at trial without cyber check. and I'm totally cool with that. That's how the system is supposed to work. The problem is if we excuse what Mosier did because he got the right person, then we've enabled him to do the unthinkable, which is get the wrong person charged. So the big question is, has the wrong person ever been charged and imprisoned?

To answer this question, the most important case to look at is that, of Sala Madi, the first cybercheck-linked conviction in Akron. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave in the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, discount Dave and the fix.

Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. When you talk to you won't hurt my son, right? I called up Renee Bryant, Salam Adi's mom, to see if she could help me make sense of it. Me's talking to you about anything. It won't harm him in any way, right? No, no. Okay, come on. So what we're doing is I work for the CBC.

After what had happened to her son, Renee was understandably suspicious of strange Canadian men coming out of the woodwork. Where did you grow up? In Akron, Ohio. You grew up in Akron. And how many children do you have? Four boys. Four boys. Yeah.

Of your four sons, what was Salah's kind of identity among the kids? What was he like? Your sweetheart. We all loved D. Yeah. The school record is not bad at all. Yeah. I don't even think he ever got in a fight.

His other brother would protect him and help him because he wasn't a fighter. Renee told me about how Sala struggled socially a bit in school. He was a sensitive kid, that he had anxiety around his peers, that he seemed to be most comfortable around animals with a family dog. He liked the girls. He a lady's man. Right. That's why everybody loved it.

Renee explained that Salah became a father at a young age, and that that's part of what makes her so sad about what happened to him. Fatherhood looked good on him. And now he has to try to be a dad from behind bars and a son from behind bars. When I go visiting, he's still laughing. We laugh so hard. We'd be talking laughing. He had grabbed my hand, and that lady kept saying,

we can't do that. So we had to actually put our hands under our table because we're going to automatically touch, so we had to keep our hands on the table. We live, play cards. He didn't want to get out there because he wanted to see his kids. He loved them kids.

But what went down to put him here? In 2018, there was a shooting in an Akron barbershop with two victims, one who died in the barber chair after being shot eight times and the other who was shot in the leg and survived. Salamadi was tried and convicted of this crime in part due to cybercheck evidence.

But there were other things that looked bad for him. He had an adversarial relationship with the police and wasn't allowed to have a gun due to past behavior. There was allegedly DNA from his mom found on a shell casing by the crime scene. The good old-fashioned cell tower evidence placed him in the part of the city both when and where the shooting happened. And most damning of all, the surviving victim who was shot in the leg told police that the guy who pulled the trigger was Salah Madh. He named him and pointed to his photo. So this evidence and a cybercheck report all came together. But when you scrutinize some of these exhibits one at a time,

they start to thin out pretty fast. Salamadi was subject to a firearms ban, but there was never any evidence found that he had a gun. As for the cell tower data, that detail fell apart on the stand, when during cross-examination, an expert admitted that in addition to Salah's device, there were 50,000 other people, more than a quarter of the entire population of Akron, also pinging off the towers in the area that she circled.

Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence against Salamadee was the testimony from the surviving victim who claimed that it was Salah who shot him. But listen to this timeline. The shooting happens on August 28, 2018. The day after the shooting, the police interviewed the guy who was shot in the leg to see if he knew who the shooter was. And he said, quote, don't know anything to do with it, end quote. The police then conduct a wide-ranging investigation over the next year. They follow leads.

They seize some of the suspect's phones. They run DNA analyses. But they don't come up with. anything. Until, in early December 2019, nearly 16 months after the shooting, the guy who was shot in the leg gets in touch with the detectives, and he says that he wants to change his story. This guy, who the detectives noted seemed agitated and pissed off, was now behind bars himself. And from prison, he told the cops that the person who shot him over a year ago was none other than Salah Madi. Why was the guy who was shot in the leg suddenly able to remember with

absolute clarity that it was Salah who shot him? After talking with Renee, she wanted to help hook me up with Salah himself. Hi, Salah. Hey. You can hear me. Oh, great. Speaking to an in one of Ohio's prisons is extremely difficult. And the line when we were able to connect was not very good. But through the static, I asked Salah, what happened? And he told me the story of a phone call. I was at a friend house. And it was a channeled like before. Sometime in December, Salah was hanging out with his best friend and his best friend's girlfriend.

The situation was that this woman had been in a romantic relationship with the guy who was calling her. But now, she was with Salah's buddy. And during this phone call, she was basically breaking. this bad news. And the girl was saying stuff to the dude on the phone, like, you know, maybe he can't, like, we're not together no more, I'm with him. Things start escalating, getting heated.

Next thing, Salah's buddy takes the phone, and he's getting into it with this guy in prison, having this very dramatic phone call, basically. And then at some point, it's mentioned that Salah Madi is also in the room. And the guy on the phone is like, oh, Salah's there? He knows him.

So the guy that on the phone, I know him a lot. He didn't want to be a girl. He'd be off on the same neighborhood. He'd known Salah since he was little, it turned out. And in his aggravated state, he was like, put Salah on the phone. And when Salah puts the phone to his ear, this guy's like, you need to fight this guy.

You need to fight your friend, and you need to do it right now. He wanted me to fight my friend that I'd be with him day because he was messing with his girlfriend. And, like, no, I ain't own none of that. You know, we're out here with a chiller, you know. Salah's like, I'm not fighting my best friend. And then, crucially, this guy thinks that he hears all of them laughing at him. And he says something like, oh, you're all in the background, crack some joke.

And he becomes incensed. The call ends, and the guy in prison suddenly remembers who had shot him in that barbershop 16 months earlier. It was Salah Madi. Salah is arrested, taken from his family. the pandemic hits, so his trial isn't until almost three years later in October 2022, where at the trial, this guy who had named Salah as the guy who shot him experienced another change of heart. He refused to testify. After complaining about being, quote, dragged out of jail to be here, end quote, he said that he didn't know who shot him and refused to answer any more questions.

And so it seemed like this was going to be a very thin prosecution. But I guess they had something else, didn't they? Do you think that the cyber check evidence made a big difference in your trust? Yes, I think that's the only thing I made it that something. It wasn't for Adam Mosier. I would have never came to jail. They didn't have anything to feel about the middle of the car. Out of Mosier, he was the only person they got it on a strand

that can make you trying to make it seem like that I was the person. person because he's saying that he could ping my phone in the area. But first of all, he was never given no social media online or no phone number. And he can't even show no evidence on how he can say he ever ping my phone. He never showed that. He said, in the news, maybe that, oh, I can't show the evidence without using it. It's purred from the system. He said purrs from the system.

But I basically mean, delete it from the system. That means you don't even tie the data than you talking about. Salah describes a surreal scene, where all the evidence seems. seemed to fall away, until a man in a suit showed up from Canada, who spoke intelligently about a complicated technology that said Sala was there. And Sala would look into the jury box, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was all laughing and giggling in the courtroom and cracking jokes and stuff like that. And then some of the jury members just falling in the street.

You know? It was not a no jury about period, and it was not a jury about period. I'm supposed to have a jury in my peers. Everybody that came there was, what, 40, 50 years older. Probably 60 years old. That jury, with older, potentially less tech-savvy members on it, was the same jury that had Akron Beacon Journal reporter Stephanie's neighbor on it. It was also the jury who, as she told Stephanie,

convicted Salamadi of murder because they believed Cybercheck. And then Salah was sentenced to life in prison. Salah Madi may have pulled the trigger in that barbershop back in 2018. I have no idea. But was there enough evidence to convict Salam Madi of that crime? When I was with him, I asked Moser about this case. There's quotes from jury members being like the thing that led me was really influential in the jury room. Was the cyber check evidence?

Does that weigh on you at all? It doesn't weigh on me heavily because, again, I'd have to go back and dig. I think there was more to it than just cybercheck. Right. But if there isn't much evidence in those cases, does that change how you feel at all? Or it's just kind of how do you feel about it? I don't feel heavily about it. I don't.

No. Both Salamadie and Adiris Black appealed their prosecutions. But they're not the only people in a cell after Cybercheck intervened in their prosecution. They were just the first that we knew about. As we've been making this series, Sadiq Spence, Rashad Montreal Turner, are some of the names of people we've come across, identified by Cybercheck in killings saying they are innocent, and who are now incarcerated, and are trying to clear their names.

Do you accept that in cases where there's no other corroborating evidence or in cases where jurors have convicted someone? And then they said that cyber check evidence was the thing that changed their mind. Is it possible that there could be a miscarriage of justice? Could it be? I don't know what the likelihood of that would be. I've spent a lot of time thinking about Adam Mosher this year. I've listened to countless people talk about him. Listen to him tell his own story about himself, about his company.

But what I really wonder about is what story does he tell himself? In the quiet moments, in the bathroom mirror, in the silence before he falls asleep. What is said? Does his slippery relationship with the truth extend to conversations with himself? Does he grasp what he's doing? Does he grasp? what he's done? I spent a lot of time trying to reverse roles with Adam Mosier.

You know, who is Adam? And my conversation as Adam was, I really got into this for the right reasons, and I want to help victims. And I think I'm good at what I do in forensics, and I think I provide a good service. And I really believe that's where Adam came from. And then it's a little bit more difficult

call it to reverse roles with Adam and try to anticipate his mindset for right now. And that conversation sounds like, look, the end justifies the means. And yeah, sure, maybe I have been overzealous in selling my product. Maybe I've been overzealous in describing my abilities. But damn it, this is a good product and I'm doing a good thing. These are bad people that need to be put away. And I'm not going to let Malarsik or any other judge. or a prosecutor or defense attorney dissuade me from my mission. That's who I think Adam is. We started this series with a story of Maya McFetridge,

the girl with the blue hair, shot and killed by a stray bullet at a house party in Akron. Early on in the investigation, the police told Maya's mom that they were using a state-of-the-art tool from Canada to solve the crime. At that time, they sounded like they said that they were going to be able to pinpoint exactly where everybody's cell phone was.

Like, as they said cell phones, it's not exact. And they said also, I believe, using some of the school Wi-Fi along with that, they would be able to pinpoint, they said exactly, because this is a lot of people in a big group, where everybody was standing at the time. When Cheryl and her family heard about this, they were filled with hope. It sounded like exactly the. the right tool to get justice for their girl. There were hundreds of kids partying in the street all with smartphones at the moment

the shots rang out. Surely, this would yield something. Many people recorded this on their phones. I've never heard of a case that had been as much evidence. The police were in contact with Cheryl early on, assuring her they were doing everything. They said they were using cybercheck and that they'd keep her posted. It would take about six weeks to get a result. back. So I called in six weeks. They said they hadn't had their result. I called in eight weeks.

I think they said that they didn't find out really anything. Over the coming months, Cheryl kept following up. But something had changed. It seems like now the police just don't want any part of talking to me. And they're not very nice when I call. So I haven't called in well over a year. They don't give me updates and it's stressful. I'm stuck in limbo. It's like this big missing piece with it being unsolved. And I have a hard time. I just get by. I don't thrive. And it's like this missing piece is not being solved. And now it feels like Cheryl has given up on the police ever closing her daughter's case. I've come to the conclusion. They just don't want to arrest any.

Anybody? Maya McFetridge has been gone for over four years now. She has not forgotten. I wish somebody could care as much as she seemed to really care about things. If somebody else would have gotten shot and died, she would have been the person, like, to make sure that that person didn't get forgotten. She would have made it her life mission to try to find out who killed them. I really do believe that.

If the best version of Mosher's intentions are true, and he really is driven by a desire to help victims, where is the helping? Because everywhere I've looked, I see investigators who can't make any sense of these reports. I see a strained court system being bogged down further trying to figure out how this is supposed to be helpful. I see families whose loved ones cases are getting less attention everywhere Cybercheck shows up. When I think of all the cases in all the states, in all the departments that are using this tool, I'm so struck by the waste of it. The wasted hours. Here we have hundreds of people who are trying to do meaningful work, important work,

who are literally trying to solve crimes and deliver the truth who are just being robbed of time. While the man who claims to only care about victims, who claims to be here, here to help seemingly has done nothing but add to their burden in exchange for money. I know there's a significant amount of people who make unhelpful things in this world, but there's a difference between making an ice cream cone that gets soggy too fast and making a crime-fighting tool that no one anywhere can point to as having made a positive difference in a case. And yet, it all continues. The AI-slash-lawful, floppification of criminal intelligence is here. It's getting baked in. It's spreading, and it's

unclear how to stop it. If you want to prove that Adam Moser lied in court under oath about big things or little things, that's easy. You can write in Wired Magazine or make a CBC podcast about the unreliability of his word and his software. You can show that his product wasn't peer-reviewed and that he wasn't an expert witness, that he's never shown anyone the full code or how it works. Finding evidence to demonstrate these things is the easy part. It's the getting people to care. That's hard. 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, and was produced by David Waters. The series was developed and reported by David Waters and Jessica Hatcher. Our editor is Veronica Simmons. The coordinating producer is Emily Cannell, Mix by Garrett Teeteman. Additional audio from 19 News, 3 News, News 5 Cleveland, CBC News, WKYC, WSOC TV, and WBRZ. Our podcast art was designed by GoodT, Our cross-promo producers are Amanda Cox and Kelsey Cueva. Our video producers are Evan Agarred, Tamina Aziz, and John Lee.

Our fact-checker is Jessica Hatcher. Special thanks to Julia Whitman, Emma Wood, Anna Marie Batho, Olivia Bhutan, and Rachel Heinrichs. At RAW, Deborah Duggen is the head of podcasts. The production executive is Letitia Kizuza. 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. 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 slash podcasts.