Case Studies

Phone forensics on TV

by Mark Rowe

It was a long-running secret that TV viewers have known but police have struggled to piece together. With digital forensic technology, investigators on BBC1 crime drama The Fall seem to have found their man.

Cellebrite’s UFED Touch Ultimate is used by police and law enforcers to extract data from mobile phones during criminal investigations, and in the fictional world, in episode 5 of Series 2 that aired last Thursday December 11, it helped DSI Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson track down the show’s remorseless serial killer Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan.

Yuval Ben-Moshe, senior director of digital forensics at Cellebrite, says: “We’ve seen our technology extract vital evidence in criminal investigations across the globe, so we were pleased to see the UFED Touch help solve a complex crime on the show, highlighting the uniqueness of our technology in this field and how vitally important our leading technology is in helping police forces solve sometimes heinous crimes.

“While the technology was used in a fictional setting for this particular case, digital evidence obtained via our UFED Touch can prove to be the final piece of the jigsaw in such cases, and The Fall’s use of the product was a classic example of how integral it is to investigations. New technologies are frequently required to bring justice to today’s mobile world, and mobile devices have become the critical element in criminal investigations.”

The six-part psychological thriller, which was centred on the murder of several women in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and followed the police hunt for the killer, will come to a conclusion this Thursday. DSI Gibson’s team are shown to be extracting content from Spector’s phone in a bid to build up enough evidence to charge him.

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