Case Studies

When a partner of a commercial real estate company caught wind of fraudulent deals being penned by the other partners of the firm, he decided to take action. However, one of the partners involved caught wind that there may be trouble, and quickly began a coordinated effort to destroy the digital trail evidence. Text messages were removed from devices and cloud-based backups destroyed.

Wage and hour class actions require specificity of aligning claims to the class. Much of this data usually resides in a multitude of platforms ranging from off-the-shelf software to proprietary timekeeping systems that often prove challenging to align and fully understand.

Today’s criminals do not plan their crimes via email and zoom exchanging PowerPoint slides. And when it comes to solving today’s complex crimes, identifying technological data points that can prove innocence or guilt beyond a reasonable doubt are at the heart of every investigation. From Fitbits to burner phones, today’s criminals leave a trail of digital fingerprints that require modern investigative technology.

The contentiousness of litigation often results in electronic discovery being weaponized. Voluminous amounts of data are produced and separating the wheat from the chaff using linear review and keyword searches of opposing counsel’s productions can become costly, exploding budgets and burying review teams in busy work. 

As with any publicly traded company, any M&A activity is required to go through a certain level of scrutiny prior to obtaining approval. ESI Analyst was recently leveraged to identify relevant communications requested as part of this process. The data in question surrounded text and multimedia-based communications between executives leveraging the popular smartphone app called “WhatsApp”.

If you want something done, the saying “There’s an app for that” isn’t far behind. One of ESI Analyst’s Channel Partners was approached with a unique problem. One of their clients had an issue where users of a commercial smartphone app were suspected of inundating it with fictitious profiles using some sort of automated smartphone emulation or “bot” technology. The database for the application was not readily available. However, there were a significant number of application logs that had recorded each end-user’s interaction with the application.

ESI Analyst's data investigation and analysis tools were called upon to understand the actions of an individual suspected to be involved with cyber-bullying using social media. The investigation began with the individual's smartphone, which was imaged to preserve and extract potentially relevant data and text-based communications. Analysis of the data extracted from the phone quickly revealed there was much more than just communications that solidified the suspected actions and motivations of this individual.

A civil litigation required the production of text messages from the litigant's iPhone. The iPhone was imaged and all forms of text-based communications were extracted, which included iMessage, SMS and MMS. The chat threads included images, video, as well as animated gifs that required expedited analysis to meet early production deadlines.