When it comes to commiting crime, the old-fashioned jimmy and crowbar are quickly being replaced by a computer's delete key.

Would-be information theives and illegal voyeurs do their dirty work, then hide their tracks by hitting the delete key, pushing a file off the computer screen and into a cyberspace netherworld, never to be found again.


Never, unless a company finds someone who knows where and how to look for it.

``The only way to be sure something is truly gone is to break the hard drive,'' said Wayne Jahn, a partner in the Forensic Technology Group, a Fort Lauderdale company that focuses on uncovering computer-assisted fraud.

FTG is a partnership of Jahn, Soneet Kapila, a CPA and certified fraud examiner, and Luis Suarez of Integrated Computer Solutions Consultants in Fort Lauderdale.

FTG recovers deleted files, and unlocks and accesses password-protected files. The five-month-old company markets its services mainly to lawyers, private investigators and police departments through direct mail, networking and one-on-one sales calls. Fees range from $150 to $550 per hour, depending on the difficulty and intensity of the search. The partners project revenue of $250,000 for this year and expect to be profitable by the end of the year.

The biggest challenge of the business is keeping up with new technology and software. ``We have to stay cutting-edge -- we have to know how things work in order to be able to break in and get the information,'' Jahn said.

``The skill set levels of the criminals out there are as high as the people doing the investigating, and their methods change on a daily basis.''

But technology for the good guys progresses as fast as for the bad guys, Jahn said. ``If someone creates a program, someone else will create a program to break it.''

The cases they deal with most commonly involve misappropriation of funds or misuse of proprietary information by employees within a company.

An employee who changes companies may take with him or her proprietary information. ``With the fluid employment market, data is being moved back and forth,'' Jahn said.

Jahn worked as a police officer in Union City, N.J., and headed the computer crime unit of the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office, also in New Jersey. When he moved to Florida, he started his own firm, Integrated Computer Solutions Consultants.

Kapila has done consulting for the SEC, FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office as an expert in fraud conveyance and insolvency issues, and has served as a consultant and expert witness in litigation matters in state and federal courts, he said. Suarez worked with Ryder and Carrier in system and network planning, design, implementation and maintenance.

The partners met during the investigation of a securities fraud case and decided to form a new company to focus on computer forensics, the investigation of crimes involving computers. ``Our competitors are most often freelancers. Our objective was to form an organization where this won't be a sideline,'' Jahn said.

Jahn's office already had much of the hardware they needed to get the company up and running. They invested about $100,000 from their own pockets in other equipment and software.

According to a study of corporations and government agencies conducted by the Computer Security Institute in San Francisco in conjunction with the San Francisco Federal Bureau of Investigation's Computer Intrusion Squad, all types of computer crime and fraud are on the rise. Unauthorized access by company insiders rose for the third straight year from 45 percent of respondents in 1998 to 55 percent in 1998 among companies polled.

Fifty-one percent of respondents acknowledged suffering financial losses from computer security breaches, but only 31 percent were able to quantify the losses. For the 163 organizations that could cite a dollar amount, losses totaled $123 million in 1999, the study said.

Miami-based lawyer Wally Martinez used Jahn's services in a case involving a client who believed one of his employees was selling proprietary information to a competitor. ``But he didn't know which employee,'' Martinez said. ``[Jahn] went into all the client's computers and was able to retrieve the information from the bad guy, who thought he had deleted it.''

Often, people forget what is in their hard drives or think it has been deleted permanently, Martinez said. ``People overlook the computer as a source of evidence. It's another tool in our arsenal to ferret out that kind of fraud.''

Copyright 1999 the Miami Herald. Republished here with the permission of the Miami Herald. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the written approval of The Miami Herald.