Collecting Online Evidence? Don’t Let Screenshots Sink Your Case

Imagine for a second that you need to collect evidence from someone’s Facebook or Twitter account. Like a surprising number of criminals, the person has just posted something incredibly incriminating that could really help your case. However, there’s also a good chance that they’ll come to their senses and delete the post. The evidence can disappear at any moment—so you need to act quickly.

Ransomware attacks are on the rise, but sophisticated dark web forensics and tools are helping investigators to transform the dark web from a murky and lawless online environment, into a treasure trove of evidence and information. In the 1900s, organised crime was personified by Al Capone, Frank Costello and John Gotti — infamous names that are still known today, even though they operated in a limited geographical area.

Documentation and data in modern business are generated at a rapid pace, both on and offline. A wide variety of industries, such as banking and the financial sector, have to manage thousands of different types of documents regularly. Keeping up with this cumulative documentation can be difficult and costly. A digitized, paperless business means an increase of the office’s organization, work efficiency and more accurate results.

Chain of custody, in a legal context, can refer to both physical and electronic evidence. With the huge increase in the leverage of the latter within litigation cases, today, chain of custody is a key requirement of any eDiscovery process.

Unlike some other eDiscovery processes, a legal hold reaches far beyond your legal department and can potentially impact personnel across your whole business.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of protecting your website content from intellectual property (IP) theft. By keeping a complete archive of your website—including all edits and deletions—it becomes much easier to prove that original content from your site has been stolen by another party.

Social media offers investigators incredible opportunities to collect evidence. There are plenty of examples on the Internet of supposedly injured individuals posting runs and rides on Strava and incriminating car crash footage making its way onto YouTube. In fact, social media intelligence (SOCMINT or SMI) has become a standard part of many investigations—including insurance fraud, IP theft, online defamation, and even criminal cases. 

Ways to Protect Yourself Online from "Crooked Sweethearts" Catphishing (or “Catfishing”) is a “romance scam” and form of fraud, highly popularised by the use of social media networks, online chat forums and documentary-turned television series by the same name. The term “catfish” was defined in the Oxford dictionary in 2014 (“to lure someone into a relationship by adopting a fictional online persona”), but is also a form of Phishing for information and so many legal and tech professionals refer to this as “Catphishing”.

Not long ago, deepfake videos – videos that portray something in a very convincing way but are actually entirely false - were something that largely existed in Hollywood – the product of special effects studios and experts trained to make the fictional seem realistic. Those familiar with the ever-evolving, rapidly changing pace of technology, however, will likely be unsurprised to find that this is no longer the case. In fact, deepfake videos are increasingly popping up online and across various media outlets all over the world in troubling numbers.