It Seemed Like an AI Crime-Fighting Super Tool. Then Defense Attorneys Started Asking Questions

In 2017, then 9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun was abducted. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, who was accused of the abduction, following 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 didn’t provide any evidence to support its findings, Eichholz couldn’t use the report to obtain a search warrant.

Unbehaun was finally reunited with her father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment shop in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized her mother from a picture shown on the Netflix show Unsolved Mysteries. After Unbehaun was located, Eichholz learned during the follow-up investigation that, until several months earlier, the pair had indeed been living in Oregon.

“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and go with it,” Eichholz says. “That was always the hang-up for us. ‘OK, you got me this information, but I still have to check and verify and do my thing with search warrants.’” The child abduction case against Heather Unbehaun is ongoing.

Any Help They Can Get

Cybercheck has spread to law enforcement agencies across the country thanks to generous marketing offers and word-of-mouth recommendations. 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, such as Borden from Midland County, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction had been using it. And when it came up in a case, they let the adversarial court system decide whether or not it was legitimate.

“It was new technology and I was curious, so I was like, ‘Let’s give it a try and see how far we can get,’” Borden says. “I’m thankful that it didn’t come into evidence in my case, that I didn’t need it to get my conviction.”

Emails show Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offered to run police departments’ cases through Cybercheck for free in order to demonstrate the technology. They also referenced cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high profile and that Cybercheck supposedly helped solve, without naming the cases outright 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 excited 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 helped convince other agencies to trust the company.

Gessner, from the Summit County Prosecutor’s office, says that when his agency was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked the Ohio BCI’s cybercrimes unit for an opinion. “They said, yes, it makes sense … we don’t have the technology to do this, but we’d love to have it.” County prosecutors also reached out to the SANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute didn’t “do this type of stuff.”

But even as it has withdrawn evidence that Cybercheck provided, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies whether they can do the same kind of open source locating that Global Intelligence marketed.

“We don’t want to shut doors that can help point to the truth in our cases,” he says.