Digital evidence from smartphones, cell towers, cloud storage, and security cameras can provide vast amounts of information for criminal and civil court cases – telling a story about users’ whereabouts and activities.
Because high-tech devices continually record digital footprints, it’s important to properly recover, investigate, and authenticate digital evidence that is part of a court case or even an insurance case.
Cell phone tower location data is routinely purged, which is why it’s critical to hire a high-tech evidence private investigator ASAP to help preserve it.
That’s why Berry-Waltz Investigations (BWI) is partnering with Digital Forensics Expertise and Technology (d/FEAT) to expand the firm’s private investigative capabilities to all things high-tech.
BWI and d/FEAT have joined forces to offer comprehensive digital forensic investigations for electronic evidence from cell phones, cell towers, security (and other) cameras, video, cloud, and computer data.
d/FEAT President Kyne Marshall says digital forensics can make or break a case. He works with local criminal defense attorneys and uncovers digital evidence that helps lead to the truth.
“Using factual data, including cell phone geolocation information, I can help verify a defendant’s story and location and report that back to the attorney,” Kyne says.
BWI Chief Operating Officer and Investigations Supervisor Chrystal Waltz says her company’s partnership with d/FEAT made sense because of how often digital forensics is required on cases.
“Kyne and I recently worked together on a federal bank robbery case, and the attorney we worked with was very happy with Kyne’s analysis of spy tech devices and his help pinpointing cell phone locations,” Chrystal says.
d/FEAT is currently working on a criminal case from 2018 in which security camera footage from a government building shows the defendant was miles away from the scene of the offense. However, Kyne says, if he had been brought into the case earlier, he could have recovered the defendant’s cell phone location records using cell tower data as a further bolster to prove the client is innocent.
In addition to cell phone and cellular technology forensics, Kyne also spends time analyzing audio and video evidence. His expertise includes verifying video and audio recordings to ensure they have not been edited or improperly manipulated.
“Juries rely on video evidence – and videos can lie,” Kyne says. “Depending on how the evidence was exported or collected from a recording and what software is used to play it back, it might not show what actually happened.”
Kyne says he wanted to partner with BWI because of their reputation for high-quality investigative work and their customer-oriented partnership with their clients, many of whom are criminal defense attorneys.
“Having a collaborative relationship between digital forensics and private investigations makes our attorneys’ lives easier because we lift the investigative burden off the attorneys,” Kyne says. “We meet with our attorneys and then we each go off and do our thing – and there is a lot of back-and-forth collaboration between d/FEAT and BWI to bring back the facts to our attorneys.”
