The Gilded Margin

Forensics| The Gilded Margin

There was a time when “cybercrime” made most people think about hackers breaking into a company.

Somebody steals customer information.

A business gets hit with ransomware.

A computer network goes down.

Those crimes are still happening, obviously. But there is another kind of cybercrime that is much more personal.

It happens to people.

A former partner tracks someone’s location.

Someone takes over an ex’s social-media account.

A person threatens to release intimate images.

Someone creates fake accounts to impersonate a victim.

A perpetrator sends hundreds of messages from new numbers after being blocked.

Someone uses technology to stalk, threaten, intimidate, extort, or harass another person.

And now the federal government is putting money specifically behind the law-enforcement response to these kinds of crimes.

That is worth paying attention to.

Cybercrime against a person is becoming its own enforcement problem

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women currently has a Fiscal Year 2026 grant program specifically focused on cybercrimes against individuals.

The program supports state, tribal, and local efforts to prevent, enforce, and prosecute these offenses. The federal definition includes crimes involving computers that are used to harass, threaten, stalk, extort, coerce, cause fear, or intimidate an individual, as well as the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images of adults. (Simpler Grants)

And this isn’t just a theoretical funding opportunity.

The FY2026 program is active right now. The Department of Justice lists the application closing date as September 3, 2026. (Department of Justice)

That creates an interesting moment for an investigation.

Because when the federal government creates a funding category around a problem, agencies have to start explaining what they need.

And what they say they need can tell us quite a bit.

What are agencies actually asking for?

This is where I think the story gets much bigger than the grant announcement itself.

If Texas or DFW agencies apply for this money, I want to know what they tell the federal government.

Do they need more investigators?

Digital-forensics examiners?

Specialized software?

Computers and storage?

Training?

More personnel to work cases involving online stalking or sextortion?

Better evidence-management systems?

More victim advocates?

Someone to handle subpoenas and preservation requests?

More capacity to work with social-media companies and other technology platforms?

Those aren’t just budget questions.

They’re clues.

If an agency says it needs additional digital-forensics capacity because investigators are waiting weeks or months for examinations, that’s information we should know.

If an agency says officers aren’t receiving enough training to recognize technology-facilitated stalking, that’s a different problem.

If an agency says it has the technology but not enough people trained to use it, that’s another.

The grant applications could give us a picture of what law enforcement believes it cannot currently do well enough.

And then I want to compare that with what victims experience

Because there’s a huge difference between an agency saying, “We investigate cybercrime,” and a victim actually trying to report what happened.

Imagine someone walks into a police department and says:

“My ex is tracking my location.”

Or:

“He has access to my accounts.”

Or:

“She created fake accounts pretending to be me.”

Or:

“He is threatening to release private pictures.”

Or:

“Someone keeps making new accounts after I block them.”

What happens next?

Does the officer recognize the conduct as potentially criminal?

Does someone know how to preserve the evidence?

Does the agency know what information to request from a platform?

Does the victim get told to simply block the person?

Does the agency have a dedicated investigator?

Does the case get referred somewhere else?

Does anyone explain what evidence the victim should preserve?

Does anyone follow up?

Those are the questions I want answered.

Because a technology-facilitated crime is still a crime.

The fact that the weapon is a phone doesn’t make the harm less real.

And the evidence can disappear quickly

This is one of the things that makes these cases different.

A physical crime scene may still be there when an investigator arrives.

A digital crime scene can change while everyone is trying to figure out what happened.

Messages disappear.

Accounts are deleted.

Stories expire.

Posts are edited.

Usernames change.

People get blocked.

Devices get reset.

Platforms change their policies.

And sometimes the victim is being asked to preserve evidence while simultaneously trying to get harmful material removed.

That is an awful position to put someone in.

There is a particularly interesting 2026 study involving survivors of non-consensual intimate imagery that looked at what happens when victims try to report abuse directly to online platforms.

The researchers interviewed 13 victim-survivors and found that platform reporting processes could be opaque, inconsistent, and ineffective. Participants described having to re-engage with abusive material to report it and having their experiences forced into narrow reporting categories that didn’t necessarily fit what happened to them. (DOI)

That’s important because the platform can become part of the evidence chain.

The victim is trying to get the material removed.

Law enforcement may need that material preserved as evidence.

The platform may be responsible for responding to the report.

And the victim is stuck in the middle.

Removing the evidence and preserving the evidence are not always the same thing

This is one of the hardest issues in this area.

A victim understandably wants an intimate image taken down immediately.

Of course they do.

They shouldn’t have to keep looking at it.

They shouldn’t have to keep sending it to people.

They shouldn’t have to explain over and over again what happened.

But investigators may need evidence to establish what happened, who posted it, when it was posted, where it went, or who accessed it.

That’s why law enforcement and victim-service policies matter so much.

There needs to be a way to protect the victim without casually destroying the evidence needed to pursue the offender.

And there needs to be a way to preserve evidence without making the victim repeatedly interact with the abuse.

That is a policy and training problem.

It isn’t something victims should have to solve themselves.

AI makes this even more complicated

The technology-facilitated abuse landscape isn’t standing still.

A person no longer necessarily needs an authentic intimate photograph to create something deeply harmful.

AI-generated sexual imagery can be created using someone’s face or likeness.

The technology behind synthetic non-consensual intimate imagery is evolving quickly, and researchers have documented online communities sharing tools, resources, and methods for creating and distributing this material. (arXiv)

That creates another question for law enforcement:

Are agencies prepared to investigate something that may never have existed as an actual photograph?

The old question was:

“Who took the picture?”

Now we may have to ask:

“Who created the image, what tools were used, where was it generated, who distributed it, and how do we prove what happened?”

That’s a very different investigative problem.

Sextortion belongs in this conversation, too

So does stalking.

So does impersonation.

So does account compromise.

So does location tracking.

So does digital harassment.

These cases can look very different on the surface, but they have something in common.

Technology can allow an offender to stay connected to a victim long after the victim has tried to escape.

A blocked phone number doesn’t necessarily end contact.

A new social-media account can appear in minutes.

A location-sharing feature can expose where someone is.

A compromised email account can provide access to an enormous amount of personal information.

An intimate image can be copied and redistributed.

And an AI-generated image can create a new form of abuse altogether.

The technology changes.

The underlying behavior doesn’t always change as much as we think.

Control.

Fear.

Intimidation.

Harassment.

Humiliation.

Extortion.

Stalking.

Those are old behaviors being given new tools.

So what do Texas agencies say they need?

That’s the investigation I’d like to see.

Not what the grant program says agencies could buy.

What do agencies actually say they need?

Which Texas agencies applied?

Which DFW agencies applied?

Who received funding?

How much?

What did they say they would spend it on?

Are they hiring people?

Buying equipment?

Building a digital-forensics unit?

Creating a cybercrime investigator position?

Training patrol officers?

Creating specialized victim-response protocols?

And then, a year or two from now:

Did it work?

That’s where the grant records become much more than government paperwork.

They become a baseline.

I’d want to collect the records before interviewing anybody

This is one of those investigations where the paperwork should come first.

I’d start with the grant applications and awards.

Then I’d collect whatever public information exists about the agencies’ cybercrime caseloads.

How many reports?

How many investigations?

How many arrests?

How many cases cleared?

How many are referred to prosecutors?

How many are declined?

How many are still open?

I’d want digital-forensics backlogs, if agencies maintain them.

I’d want training records.

I’d want policies explaining how technology-facilitated stalking and intimate-image abuse are handled.

I’d want referral procedures.

I’d want victim-notification policies.

And I’d want to know whether agencies have specific procedures for cases involving rapidly changing digital evidence.

Not every agency will maintain every piece of data.

That’s okay.

The gaps are information, too.

If an agency can’t tell you how many technology-facilitated stalking cases it has, that raises a different question than an agency that can provide a detailed breakdown.

Then I’d talk to the people doing the work

Investigators will tell you where the practical problems are.

Digital-forensics examiners can explain what happens when there are more devices than people available to process them.

Prosecutors can explain what makes these cases difficult to prove.

Victim advocates can explain what happens when the criminal justice system and the victim’s immediate needs don’t line up.

Researchers can explain how the technology is changing.

And survivors, if they want to participate, can tell us what the process actually felt like from the other side of the desk.

But that last category needs to be handled differently.

A survivor shouldn’t have to hand over intimate material to prove that intimate-image abuse is real.

They shouldn’t have to send around compromising images so an investigation can be illustrated.

And they shouldn’t have to repeatedly recount traumatic details simply because multiple agencies have different intake systems.

An investigation into victim services shouldn’t become another burden on victims.

The question I’m really interested in is whether the system can keep up

Technology-facilitated abuse is moving quickly.

Law enforcement doesn’t get to wait until every investigator understands every platform.

Victims don’t get to wait for the next training cycle.

And an investigator can’t necessarily treat a digital case like a traditional case with a few screenshots attached.

There are preservation issues.

Jurisdiction issues.

Platform issues.

Authentication issues.

Privacy issues.

Evidence-storage issues.

Victim-safety issues.

And now AI-generated evidence and synthetic media issues.

That’s a lot for a local agency to handle.

Which is why the federal decision to create dedicated funding for cybercrimes against individuals matters.

It acknowledges something that victims have been experiencing for years:

A crime doesn’t become less serious because the offender used a keyboard instead of a doorway.

The story isn’t whether Texas has cybercrime units

That’s too easy.

The better question is:

What happens when a person reports a technology-facilitated crime against them?

Who takes the report?

Who investigates it?

Who preserves the evidence?

Who talks to the platform?

Who explains the process to the victim?

Who decides whether the case moves forward?

How long does it take?

What happens to the evidence?

And does the person who caused the harm actually face consequences?

Those answers may be very different from agency to agency.

And that’s exactly why the FY2026 federal funding opportunity gives us a useful starting point.

The money tells us the federal government sees a problem.

The applications can tell us what local agencies believe they need.

The records can tell us what they’re actually handling.

And victims can tell us what happens when the system meets the reality of their lives.

That’s where the investigation is.

Not in another story about how technology is changing crime.

We already know it is.

The real question is whether law enforcement is changing fast enough with it.

References

Office on Violence Against Women. (2026). FY 2026 Local Law Enforcement Grants for Enforcement of Cybercrimes Against Individuals Program. U.S. Department of Justice. Office on Violence Against Women funding opportunities

Qiwei, L., Kennon, K., Bedera, N., Eaton, A. A., Gilbert, E., & Schoenebeck, S. (2026). Platforms as crime scene, judge, and jury: How victim-survivors of non-consensual intimate imagery report abuse online. Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791115

Medeiros, B. B. P., Jadhav, M., Lu, A., Kohno, T., Bindschaedler, V., & Butler, K. B. (2026). Characterizing resource sharing practices on underground Internet forum synthetic non-consensual intimate image content creation communities. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.12190