Ghana Police can recover your deleted messages and trace digital evidence, here's how

• The Ghana Police Service has received advanced digital forensic tools from the Czech Republic to strengthen cybercrime investigations and digital evidence analysis.

• The MOBILedit Forensic software can help investigators retrieve deleted messages, analyse smartphones, track communication records and generate digital evidence for court cases.

• The technology will improve investigations into cyber fraud, mobile money scams, hacking and online crimes, while raising the need for lawful handling of digital privacy and data protection.

The Ghana Police Service is set to significantly strengthen its cybercrime investigations after receiving advanced digital forensic tools from the Czech Republic, giving investigators the ability to retrieve deleted messages, analyse your smartphones and track digital evidence in criminal cases.

The equipment and software was donated to the Cybercrime Unit of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) as part of ongoing cybersecurity cooperation between Ghana and Czechia. The package includes specialized forensic hardware and the MOBILedit Forensic software suite developed by the Czech technology company, Compelson.

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Simply, the software allows investigators to examine mobile phones and smart devices in ways ordinary users cannot. Once a device is legally seized during investigations, forensic experts can connect it to the system and extract large amounts of digital information including call logs, SMS messages, WhatsApp chats, Telegram conversations, images, videos, contacts, browser history and application data.

What makes the technology especially powerful is its ability to recover some deleted information that may still exist inside a device’s storage system.

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According to Compelson, MOBILedit Forensic can retrieve deleted messages, deleted call logs and hidden files depending on the condition of the device, the type of phone and whether the data has already been overwritten. The software can also organise the information into timelines and forensic reports that investigators can use as evidence in court.

In case you did not know, when you delete files or chats from your smartphone, the information is not always immediately erased permanently. In many cases, the data remains stored in the phone’s memory until new information replaces it. Forensic software scans the device’s databases, backups and storage systems to locate traces of those deleted records.

For example, if a suspect deletes WhatsApp messages, investigators may still recover fragments of the conversations from local backups, notification logs or phone databases. Research shows that messaging applications often leave behind metadata and recoverable traces that can help investigators reconstruct conversations and communication timelines.

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The technology can also analyse encrypted messaging applications such as Telegram, although recovering deleted content from the platform is usually more difficult because of stronger end-to-end encryption systems. 

In some cases, investigators may rely on phone notification records, cloud backups or data remnants stored within the device itself rather than breaking the encryption directly.

The system is expected to improve the Ghana Police Service’s ability to investigate cyber fraud, online scams, extortion, mobile money fraud, identity theft, hacking and organised digital crimes which have become increasingly common in Ghana in recent years.

Cybersecurity analysts say digital evidence is now central to modern criminal investigations because many crimes leave electronic footprints through phones, social media accounts, emails or mobile applications. 

This donation is a boost for Ghana in fighting against cybercrime.