Editor’s note: As one of the best DVR forensic solution provider, SalvationDATA helped the Thai Police successfully to extracted and recovered the abnormal video files which was proved to be the key evidence for the fire crime investigation.

It was a horrible night traced back to 2019 when we first got involved with the Royal Thai Police for a shocking arson case.

Though we’ve really heard numerous cases that are led by fire-setting, it’s more than what we can imagine for an on-purpose arson case, especially It was a case related to a police officer, whose home was burned up during the case.

Without available proof for the case, things got harder for forensics investigators. The last possible proof for the case was the CCTV beside the road. Unfortunately, it’s broken and could be done by the criminals with a great chance to cover the crime. The case seems to be stuck out there and the police officer was being homeless during the period.

In June 2019, someone threw the makeshift firebomb, including rock and some liquid, through the window of a police officer’s home. The fire caused damage to the kitchen and spread everywhere, which led to a horrible fire disaster. Though the officer had just moved into the new home, lucky to him, he was absent when his home was firebombed.

“Anyone who messes with the Royal Thai police officer, or any portion of our team, there will be a reckoning for that,” A Thai Police Chief said.

Then, they came to SalvationDATA under the help of our partner in Thailand and we got together looking pretty carefully into the case.

Though they had collected numerous potential evidences, it’s not enough to figure out a precise direction towards the suspects. It was literally piece by piece out there and we could not really get them combined for an exact conclusion.

Under that circumstance, a valuable suggestion proposed by us, “We might have chances to recover the data from the broken CCTV……”

We took out the broken CCTV and connect it with its memory chip. With the function of VIP 2.0(Video Investigation Portable), we bypassed the access passwords and enables the forensic extraction of videos in normal conditions. However, things weren’t going smoothly. We got a problem with the lost, deleted, overwritten, and fragmented files since the date when the case happened was a few days ago. Fortunately, in VIP 2.0(Video Investigation Portable) that launched in 2019, we’ve already been capable of recovering such abnormal files. After several functioning to the CCTV including files recovery, Disk Imaging and etc, we generated the evidence audit and disclosure report in HTML to perfectly figure out potential evidence for the criminal’s characteristics.

Ultimately, it turned out that it was actually a brother that were drug dealers who didn’t want the officer living in their neighborhood and were trying to scare him away. They didn’t want the officer living on the street where they had a trap house functioning. ” The drug dealers ruled the neighborhood by fear and intimidation.” These two brothers ran the entire street. People were scared to tell on them. They had an extensive drug operation, and they were making a living doing this” -said by the victim police officer to restore the whole story for us. As a result, they were arrested a few weeks after.

Now, let us just wait for a minute and think about that if we did not try every effort to recover the video clips on CCTV, we can hardly find out the suspects and they might run away already by some chances. Thanks to the digital forensic technology evolves, we’re capable of not only exacting the video clips but also recovering the lost, deleted, overwritten files, finally presenting the valuable and legal evidence to the investigators.

As matter of fact, we are unable to prevent crime from happening, but we must always try the best to bring the criminals to justice by every possible means. That is what SalvationDATA always chases for.

You can download the software from our resources page of the website to have a free trial.
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About SalvationDATA: SalvationDATA is the global leader of Digital Forensic solutions for law enforcement, government, and enterprise organizations. SalvationDATA delivers an extensive suite of innovative software solutions, analytic tools, and training designed to accelerate digital investigations and address the growing complexity of handling crime and security challenges in this field. Trusted by thousands of leading agencies and companies in more than 150 countries, SalvationDATA is helping fulfill the joint mission of creating a safer world.