In 2017, it was 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun kidnapped. For years, police in South Elgin, Illinois, searched for Unbehaun and her unisolated mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of abduction, following her trail to Georgia, where they hit a dead end. At that time, the department contracted with Global Intelligence, and Sergeant Dan Eichholz received the Cybercheck report that Unbehaun and her mother had been placed in Oregon, WIRED says. This was a novel lead, but because Cybercheck had not produced any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz could not operate the report to obtain a search warrant.
Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment store in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother in a photo shown on the Netflix show Unsolved mysteries. After finding Unbehaun, through further investigation, Eichholz learned that the couple had actually been living in Oregon just a few months earlier.
“I don’t want to say that action couldn’t be taken, but I couldn’t just take their information and act on it,” Eichholz says. “That was always the main problem for us. “Okay, you gave me this information, but I still need to check it, verify it, and do what I can to get a search warrant.” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is ongoing.
Any lend a hand they can get
Cybercheck reached law enforcement agencies across the country through generous marketing offers and word-of-mouth recommendations. However, in interviews with WIRED and in the email exchanges we examined, there was little evidence that law enforcement agencies sought or received evidence to support Global Intelligence’s claims about the capabilities of its technology.
Prosecutors who spoke to WIRED, such as Borden in Midland County, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement agencies in their jurisdiction were using it. And when the case came up, they let the adversarial court decide whether it was legal.
“It was new technology and I was curious, so I thought, ‘Let’s try it and see how far we can go,’” Borden says. “I’m grateful that it wasn’t included in my case as evidence that I didn’t need it to get a conviction.”
The emails show that Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police cases for free through Cybercheck to demonstrate the technology. They also addressed cases that Global Intelligence identified as high-profile and that Cybercheck allegedly helped solve, without directly naming the cases or providing evidence that Cybercheck had any influence on the investigations.
Emails obtained by WIRED from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation indicate that investigators were initially excited about the information Cybercheck could provide about their unsolved cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. This enthusiasm appears to have helped convince other agencies to trust the company.
Gessner of the Summit County Attorney’s Office says that when his agency was deciding whether to operate Cybercheck evidence, it sought the opinion of BCI’s Ohio Cybercrime Unit. “They said, yes, it makes sense… we don’t have the technology to do it, but we’d love to have it.” He says district attorneys also contacted the SANS Institute and were told the institute “doesn’t do this type of thing.”
But even after Cybercheck’s evidence was withdrawn, Gessner says the Summit County prosecutor’s office is asking other companies if they can operate the same type of open-source localization that Global Intelligence offers.
“We don’t want to close doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.