Case Study: D4 unravels a two-year embezzlement by pinpointing a single Chinese character with Relativity

Used Relativity to Pinpoint a Single Chinese Character Within Hundreds of Thousands of Wechat Messages

D4 was hired by a Chinese company after an employee confessed to a two‑year off‑the‑books billing scheme, but the employer lacked the admissible evidence required under China’s civil law and the employee refused to surrender his personal device. Working from the employee’s company desktop and a massive set of WeChat messages, D4 engaged Relativity to parse, index and search the large, multilingual dataset to find the missing proof.

Using Relativity’s processing, conceptual index, keyword expansion, search and Analytics capabilities, D4 identified a recurring single Chinese character used as a code word, reconstructed a time‑stamped timeline of transactions, quantified the amounts misappropriated and validated key documents with a heat map. The Relativity-enabled workflow turned months of review into days, produced the smoking‑gun evidence needed to pursue recovery and legal action, and allowed the client to calculate how much money was owed.

D4

Tom Groom

Managing Director