"These incidents involve the intentional use of deceptive or illegal practices to fraudulently obtain money, assets, or information from individuals or institutions, and include actions carried out over cyber channels."
Ronald Joseph Cole was a 19-year-old with a shy smile and a buzz cut in 1965, the year he moved from San Diego to Fillmore, a town about 25 miles from Santa Clarita. He was just starting out in life and, hoping to find a job, moved in with his older half-brother David LaFever. By May 1965, Cole had stopped contacting relatives. He had disappeared.
Smartphones are now the most crucial source of digital evidence in solving nearly every criminal investigation, a report has found. Detectives rely on the wealth of information held on the devices in 97 per cent of cases - double the number in which data from laptops was needed. With the devices containing swathes of detailed messages, photos and location data, police chiefs told the Mail the devices had become 'a crime scene in your pocket'.
The strategy could be fruitful: If unidentified DNA evidence can be connected to someone - even a distant relative - in a common genealogy database, it would give investigators more information and possibly lead to a suspect in Guthrie's kidnapping in Arizona. "It's a fantastic tool," said Ruth Ballard, a geneticist in California who specializes in DNA and has testified in hundreds of court cases. "If it's a good quality sample and they're able to get a profile, they could find a hit on that fairly quickly."
Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.
An unidentified foreign hacker broke into the FBI's field office in New York in 2023 and compromised files related to the bureau's investigation into the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Reuters. The hack took advantage of a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI's New York Field Office that was left inadvertently vulnerable by an FBI special agent working on the case.
Cell-site simulators ICE has a technology known as cell-site simulators to snoop on cellphones. These surveillance devices, as the name suggests, are designed to appear as a cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones to connect to them. Once that happens, the law enforcement authorities who are using the cell-site simulators can locate and identify the phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and internet traffic.
