In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was kidnapped. For years, police in South Elgin, Illinois searched for Unbehaun and her non-custodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the kidnapping, and followed her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence, and Sergeant Dan Eichholz received a Cybercheck report that placed Unbehaun and her mother in Oregon, he tells WIRED. It was a new lead, but because Cybercheck did not provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz could not use the report to obtain a search warrant.
Unbehaun was eventually reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment store in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a photo shown on the Netflix show. Unsolved mysteries. After Unbehaun was located, Eichholz learned during the follow-up investigation that the couple had indeed lived in Oregon until several months earlier.
“I don't want to say it wasn't doable, but I couldn't just take their information,” Eichholz says. “That was always the stumbling block for us. 'Okay, you've given me this information, but I still have to check and verify it and do my thing with search warrants.'” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is still ongoing.
All the help they can get
Cybercheck has spread to law enforcement agencies across the country thanks to generous marketing offers and word of mouth. But in interviews with WIRED and the email exchanges we examined, there was little evidence that law enforcement agencies sought or received evidence to support Global Intelligence's claims about what its technology could do.
Prosecutors who spoke to WIRED, like Borden of Midland County, say they heard about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction was using it. And when it came up in a case, they let the hostile legal system decide whether or not it was legitimate.
“It was new technology and I was curious, so I thought, 'Let's give it a try and see how far we can go,'” Borden says. “I'm grateful that it didn't come up as evidence in my case, that I didn't need it to reach my conviction.”
Emails show that Global Intelligence vendors regularly offer to conduct police cases through Cybercheck for free to demonstrate the technology. They also referred to cases that Global Intelligence identified as high-profile and that Cybercheck supposedly helped solve, without outright naming the cases or providing evidence that Cybercheck had made any difference in the investigations.
Emails obtained by WIRED from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation show that investigators were initially eager to see what information Cybercheck could provide about their cold cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. That enthusiasm seems to have convinced other agencies to trust the company.
Gessner, of the Summit County Prosecutor's Office, says that when his office was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked the Ohio BCI's cybercrime unit for guidance. “They said, yes, that makes sense… we don't have the technology to do this, but we would like to have it.” County attorneys also contacted the SANS Institute, he said, and were told the institute “didn't do things like this.”
But even now that the evidence Cybercheck provided has been retracted, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor's Office is asking other companies if they can do the same kind of open source localization that Global Intelligence is marketing.
“We don't want to close doors that could help bring out the truth in our cases,” he said.
