In 2017, Kayla Unbehaun, then 9 years old, was kidnapped. For years, the South Elgin, Illinois, police department searched for Unbehaun and her noncustodial mother, Heather Unbehaun, accused of the kidnapping, following their trail to Georgia, where they came to a dead end. During that time, the department signed a contract with Global Intelligence and Sergeant Dan Eichholz received a report from Cybercheck that located Unbehaun and his 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 his father in 2023, after an employee at a consignment store in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized his mother from an image shown on the Netflix show. Unsolved mysteries. After locating Unbehaun, Eichholz learned during follow-up investigation that, until several months earlier, the couple had lived in Oregon.
“I don’t want to say it wasn’t actionable, but I couldn’t just take their information and move on,” Eichholz says. “That was always the problem for us. ‘Okay, you gave me this information, but I still have to check, verify and do my thing with the 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 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 Midland County’s Borden, say they learned about Cybercheck because law enforcement in their jurisdiction had been using it. And when a case came up, they let the adversarial court system decide whether it was legitimate or not.
“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 evidence in my case, that I didn’t need it to get my conviction.”
Emails show that Global Intelligence sales representatives regularly offer to handle cases for police departments through Cybercheck for free to demonstrate the technology. They also referenced cases that Global Intelligence characterized as high-profile and that Cybercheck allegedly helped solve, without naming the cases directly 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 unsolved cases. They even introduced Global Intelligence sales representatives to other law enforcement agencies in Ohio. That enthusiasm appears to have helped convince other agencies to trust the company.
Gessner, of the Summit County prosecutor’s office, says that when his agency was deciding whether to use Cybercheck evidence, it asked Ohio’s BCI cybercrime unit for an opinion. “They said yes, it makes sense… we don’t have the technology to do this, but we would love to have it.” County prosecutors also contacted the SANS Institute, he says, and were told the institute didn’t “do this kind of thing.”
But even as it has withdrawn the evidence provided by Cybercheck, Gessner says the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office is asking other companies if they can do the same type of open source localization that Global Intelligence marketed.
“We don’t want to close doors that could help uncover the truth in our cases,” he says.