What was deleted during a divorce may be as important as what was kept. However, only if that data is gathered legally will it count. We look at devices you have ownership of either individually or jointly; alternatively, we can act upon the instructions of family solicitors in both Swansea and Cardiff. Freephone advice for initial guidance prior to anything being sent.
Discreet investigations are conducted, documented and defendable. There is no cost for an initial diagnosis and a written scope is agreed prior to beginning forensic examination, which is payable upfront.
Below are the family case examples which we assist our clients with throughout Swansea and South Wales, always based on an examination of a device where there is a lawful basis to do so.
Before we start on any type of examination, we want to make sure you have the right to search. In order for us to provide you with this opportunity one of three basic criteria needs to be met: the equipment genuinely belongs to you; the equipment is a joint ownership item, such as a computer used by everyone in the home or a backup drive; or the work comes through your solicitor and/or is ordered by a court. There is nothing else that meets our requirements. Looking at your spouse's private phone or emails is illegal under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. If anything were found there, it would very likely be thrown out as evidence. And looking may potentially harm your case even if you had been successful in finding something incriminating. The legal way is a few days slower but much better.
Recoverable data is often substantial: deleted WhatsApp messages, SMS and iMessages, e-mails, photos that contain their creation date, documents and spreadsheets, as well as a web browser's history of activity around key events. Timestamps are created by operating systems to track the creation time, last accessed time or deletion time for each file. In financial matters, we often reconstruct bank account statements, transfers and accounting records relating to disclosure, useful in situations where reported figures do not align with observable spending.
We generally do family work on behalf of solicitors and have no preference for how this is done: instructed solely by one party; or as the single joint expert appointed jointly for both parties. In our capacity as joint experts, we will image the agreed device; limit our examinations to that which has been sanctioned by the court; and provide a fair/neutral report. Our duty is to the court, not who pays the bill. The findings will be in plain language so they can easily be used by a judge; all technical details will be provided in an appendix, and an explanation of where the limitations of the evidence lie will be given as plainly as the explanation of the evidence itself.
A device you have a right to inspect might contain evidence. The temptation to open it and see what's there should be resisted. Any time it is unlocked, an app store recovery tool has a 'look' at this type of device or a 'helpful' friend has a 'browse', the data already present on the device (that could be relevant) is overwritten by new data, and the date stamps, which will be examined by the courts, are also affected. So turn it off now. Store it safely and call our freephone number from anywhere within Swansea or South Wales or get your solicitor to instruct us, after which we document everything related to its handling.
Family work that includes write-blocked imaging, hashing and custodial records to verify integrity is covered in detail at our forensic data recovery hub. Forensic cases are always payable up front, as per the data recovery cost page: either £800 + VAT for the standard investigation into your case which will include a comprehensive report, or £400 + VAT just for the recovery of the binary image(s) from your drive(s) and the extraction of deleted files from your drives which will not include a report. If you have a family computer that is encrypted by BitLocker we can decrypt the same first if you hold the recovery keys legally.
Categories of data that we usually recover from devices belonging to yourself or a jointly owned device, or one that the court has ordered us to examine:
Your erased messages from WhatsApp, iMessage and SMS conversations.
Deleted email communications as well as deleted documents and spreadsheets.
Pictures that were removed, along with the date they were taken.
Your search history and sign-in activity related to important timeframes surrounding key events.
Statements, money transfers and bookkeeping files needed for disclosure.
Times when things were created, opened and deleted help to tie down specific events.
No matter how confident you may be regarding what your spouse's personal telephone or email communications would reveal, we will not enter these covertly: that is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, the evidence produced by such means would most probably be inadmissible and could potentially be used against you during the course of the proceedings. These are the only three ways you can access this service: by using devices which you own; using assets that you truly do have joint ownership of with your spouse; or through instructions via a solicitor or the family court.
Ring us on 0800 689 0668, or get your solicitor to call for you, as we want a brief conversation about lawful basis first, before you post anything to us. We will check if there is an entitlement, give you a quote, and agree which hard drive to send (we are only interested in the drive, not the PC), with custody logged from the moment it arrives at our secure Bristol location.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
We would like you to ring us directly or have your solicitor contact us to make arrangements for your matter, with a free diagnostic first and a full court-ready service from start to finish.