Case Study: Extracting And Analyzing Messenger Data With Oxygen Forensic Detective

by Nikola Novak

It‘s a great pleasure to share my experience of working with Oxygen Forensic Detective, which was a crucial tool in solving one of my cases.

A father of a minor girl contacted me, worried his daughter was in suspicious society and probably had been consuming marijuana. His wife accidentally found traces of a substance which looked and smelled like marijuana in his daughter‘s clothes and that led him to that conclusion.

Polygraphic testing pointed that the girl was intensively communicating with her friends mostly via Facebook and mobile messenger apps, so I suggested to her parents to thoroughly examine her phone, believing they would found incriminating evidence.

The parents reached me a day later and told me they examined the messages in all the installed apps and that they hadn‘t found any message that would justify their doubts, so they assumed the messages were deleted after the polygraphic testing.


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I suggested a forensic analysis of a mobile phone: Tesla Smartphone 6.4 Lite. After her parents insisted on that, the girl reluctantly agreed.

After physical acqusition I focused on analysing the data from the messenger apps and I noticed that a complete communication from Viber app had been deleted.

Photo.1: Recover deleted Viber messages

Oxygen Forensic Detective successfully retrieved all deleted data, among which even 4652 Viber messages which were crucial in finding incriminating contacts and reconstruction of her movements. I have to admit I was fascinated by the result because I didn‘t expect that number of retrieved messages.

By using Oxygen Forensic Detective analytical tools I quickly filtered Viber communication and presented the contacted people, frequency of communication as well as the content of the messages to her parents in a simple way which I delivered to them in the form of very clear PDF report.

Photo 2: Analysis of Viber communication

Mobile devices are an important part of our lives and unavoidable subject of our inquiries. In most of the polygraphic tests a trace leads me towards mobile phones and because of that Oxygen Forensic Detective is a necessary additional tool in my work.

Photo 3: Reconstruction of movements

Find out more about Oxygen Forensic Detective at oxygen-forensic.com.

About Nikola Novak

Novak started his career early, as a student, while working in investigation agency Protecta as an associate investigator, where he learned the basic tactics of secret surveillance from ex secret service agents. Novak later became a private investigator in the agency, and advanced to the level where he managed the private investigations unit department. Novak has over a decade of experience working in the private security industry. In his career Novak has worked on more than 3,000 private investigation cases and conducted more than 1,000 polygraph examinations worldwide.

Mr. Novak is president and founder of Security and Education Association of Serbia, which gathers all the agencies from the private security sector in Serbia and organizes post-secondary education classes and specialized training courses for people who operate in the private security, polygraph and investigations industry. Novak is also founder and director of the European Polygraph Academy, which conducts basic polygraph examiner training using APA standards and continuing education for polygraph examiners worldwide. The European Polygraph Academy is the first polygraph education institution of its kind to be created and operational in continental Europe. Mr. Novak is also a course coordinator for the courses held in the European Polygraph Academy, where he also works as a co-instructor and teaches the students who attend the basic polygraph examiner training course. Mr. Novak is a member of every relevant international association – World Association of Detectives, International Association of Private Detectives, American Polygraph Association, European Polygraph Association, British and European Polygraph Association, National Polygraph Association and European Society of Criminology.

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Throughout the past few years, the way employees communicate with each other has changed forever.

69% of employees note that the number of business applications they use at work has increased during the pandemic.

Desk phones, LAN lines and even VOIP have become technologies of the past workplace environment as employees turn to cloud applications on their computers and phones to collaborate with each other in today’s workplace environment.

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Corporate investigators and eDiscovery professionals need to seamlessly collect relevant data from cloud sources and accelerate the time to investigative and discovery review.

With the latest in Cellebrite’s remote collection suite of capabilities, investigators and legal professionals can benefit from secure collection with targeted capabilities for the most used workplace applications.

Join Monica Harris, Product Business Manager, as she showcases how investigators can:

- Manage multiple cloud collections through a web interface
- Cull data prior to collection to save time and money by gaining these valuable insights of the data available
- Collect data from the fastest growing cloud collaboration applications like Office365, Google Workspace, Slack and Box
- Login to a single source for workplace app collection without logging into every app and pulling data from multiple sources for every employee
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Boris Johnson image - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/10/spot-the-difference-boris-johnson-appears-scrubbed-from-photo-posted-by-grant-shapps

Deep Fake Neighbour Wars - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21371376/

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Nvidia eye contact AI - https://www.polygon.com/23571376/nvidia-broadcast-eye-contact-ai and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl87WTDrReo

Birthday problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Same frightening woman in AI images - https://petapixel.com/2022/09/09/the-same-frightening-woman-keeps-appearing-in-ai-generated-images/

Inherent mysogeny of AI portraits - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/09/lensa-ai-portraits-misogyny

Midjourney - https://www.midjourney.org/

Deepfake porn legality - https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/25/23477548/uk-deepfake-porn-illegal-offence-online-safety-bill-proposal and https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/12/1018222/deepfake-revenge-porn-coming-ban/

AIATSIS - https://aiatsis.gov.au/cultural-sensitivity

Fake tiger porn story - https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/tiger-porn-britain-law/

Group photo with no blinking - https://www.countrylife.co.uk/comment-opinion/curious-questions-group-photo-179102

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Domestika - https://www.domestika.org/en/courses/981-introduction-to-interviewing-the-art-of-conversation

Investigative Interviewing - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0199681899?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Forensic Focus events calendar - https://www.forensicfocus.com/events/

Si Twitter - https://twitter.com/si_biles

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Boris Johnson image - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/10/spot-the-difference-boris-johnson-appears-scrubbed-from-photo-posted-by-grant-shapps

Deep Fake Neighbour Wars - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21371376/

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Nvidia eye contact AI - https://www.polygon.com/23571376/nvidia-broadcast-eye-contact-ai and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl87WTDrReo

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