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Malarcik filed a motion where he asked the prosecutor to provide Cybercheck’s software in another case for which a report had been generated. He also subpoenaed Mosher, and hired a digital forensics expert in an attempt to review the code and the two Cybercheck reports about Mendoza. He tells WIRED that all that experts in a separate case allegedly saw were a couple hundred lines of code that created a program for searching public websites for information about a subject—nothing like the 1 million lines of code and more than 700 algorithms Mosher has testified about in pre-trial hearings.

“It was the equivalent of what you would do on a Google search,” Malarcik alleges. “What we didn’t see is the secret sauce, which [Mosher] claims is the machine learning that takes these data points and turns it into intelligence that takes a cyber profile and says it was at this location. That’s what he’s never disclosed to us.”

Mosher and Global Intelligence did not respond to WIRED’s questions about Malarcik’s claims.

Malarcik requested the court hold what is known as a Daubert hearing to determine whether Mosher’s testimony about Cybercheck’s findings was credible enough to be admitted as evidence in Mendoza’s trial. Two days before the hearing date, Summit County prosecutors decided to not use Cybercheck as evidence. Since then, the prosecutor’s office has withdrawn Cybercheck reports in three other cases, involving four men accused of murder, in which they potentially could have been presented as evidence, according to Malarcik and court records. In early August, Mendoza pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve at least 15 years of a 15-to-20.5-year sentence.

“In the cases we had with Cybercheck that went to trial, there were those aspects that Cybercheck found that the boots-on-the-ground detectives also found,” Brad Gessner, the Summit County prosecutor’s chief counsel, tells WIRED. “Those things matched.”

In total, the office has used, or intended to use, Cybercheck reports in 10 cases brought to them by the Akron Police Department, Gessner said. The Akron Beacon Journal and NBC News were the first to report about the county’s use of the tool.

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to the Akron Beacon Journal this month that it is investigating whether Mosher lied under oath but provided no other details.

In other cases—murder trials for Salah Mahdi and Adarus Black—defense attorneys didn’t challenge the use of Cybercheck and the trials resulted in convictions. Both convictions were upheld by an appeals court.

Since then, judges overseeing the murder trials of Javion Rankin, Deair Wray, Demonte Carr, and Demetrius Carr have ruled that Cybercheck cannot be admitted as evidence unless Global Intelligence grants the defendants access to its source code. However, the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office appealed several of those rulings, and in September an Ohio appeals court ruled that the trial court erred in excluding the Cybercheck reports as evidence for reasons unrelated to the technology’s effectiveness.

In other jurisdictions, WIRED found, prosecutors have also decided not to use Cybercheck reports, or have dropped charges against defendants after defense attorneys scrutinized the findings and Mosher’s testimony.

In 2021, Midland County, Texas sheriff’s deputies were investigating the murder of a woman whose burned body had been found in a roadside field. Deputies had arrested the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Sergio Cerna, on unrelated charges.

When they searched his phone, according to an affidavit, they found text messages in which he threatened the victim, including texts that read, “Your car is going to be burned down then you will be next.” But they couldn’t find evidence that placed Cerna near the scene of the crime.

The sheriff’s office asked Cybercheck for help and received a report claiming that the algorithms had determined, with 97.25 percent accuracy, that Cerna’s cyber profile had pinged a wireless LaserJet printer near the crime scene the day the victim’s body was found. Prosecutors wanted to use the report as evidence at Cerna’s trial, but his defense requested a Daubert hearing. Halfway through the hearing and before the defense could cross-examine Mosher, assistant district attorney Lisa Borden decided not to use Mosher’s testimony or the Cybercheck report at trial.

“We would have needed to be able to authenticate that data,” she tells WIRED, but by the time of the Daubert hearing, the printer that Cybercheck had identified in its report couldn’t be located. That was the first, and only, Daubert hearing that Cybercheck has been subjected to in the country, according to court records and Global Intelligence.

A Midland County jury convicted Cerna in March and sentenced him to life in prison. Cerna’s attorney said he would appeal the conviction.