About us

Computer Forensics Online (CFO) is a small, reputable and well established British digital forensics practice.  It has been debunking the art of digital forensics for almost 10 years (since 2008) and has over 300 clients who use the company as their sole digital forensics vendor.

If you are currently paying tens of thousands of pounds to your vendor for projects or being charged per gigabyte of data, take a look at our simple day rates for collection and moslty fixed prices at the processing and investigative stages.

So how can we keep our pricing so much lower than the competition ?

- We don't advertise  (all of our work is word of mouth - personal recommendations from customer to customer)

- We don't have massive overheads (our offices are modest and not in prime real estate)

- We don't have account/project managers (I manage the project for you at no extra cost)

CFO has been refining its workflow for a long time, so the process is organised (even without those pesky managers), professional and we think you will be impressed with the service as a whole.

For small (one to ten custodians) to medium size (ten to fifty) investigations you will never use a large E-Discovery vendor again !

If you are really interested in learning more about CFO, take a very deep breath and read on;

A light-hearted look at how it all began at CFO in 2008......

Hello, I'm Jon Munsey - the founder and owner of the company.

CFO started in my garage 10 years ago, after I left behind a senior departmental manager role and a team of digital forensic investigators at a large global forensics consulting firm.

I wanted to start something fresh and new, which catered for the small to medium sized businesses that simply did not have tens of thousands of pounds to fund their vendors sales team, account managers, large London offices and other high overheads.

After leaving, I had six months of mortgage payments in the bank, the clock was ticking to obtain fee earning work.  Being under restrictive covenant from said previous employer, I had to start my client base from nothing.  Month five, week two came along - it was proving difficult to persuade potential clients that my services were as good as that of their existing vendor.  Even though I was using the same industry standard forensic software and equipment as that of my previous employer, it was a very hard sell!

That week, a letter arrived from my former employer, stating that an existing client would not deal (read trust) anyone else to do their investigations other than my good self.  Said employer issued a variance to the covenant that I was under - allowing me to lawfully complete the investigation.

The client (a  rather high profile business man) was very happy with the end result and his costs were much lower than he was accustomed to paying.

Two weeks later, another letter arrived from that same employer - with another client refusing to have their investigation handled by anyone other than myself - needless to say, those two cases jump started the company and from those small acorns I was able to build the consultancy practice I have today.

It just goes to show that relationships between a vendor and a client are very sensitive and delicate entities, trust is something that is earned - and when working with clients most sensitive and private data - trust is everything.

I slowly grew the company by word of mouth and recommendation only and watched as the customer base grew.  At first it was law firms that came to me with intellectual property investigations and civil search and seize orders.

I then became heavily involved in criminal defence work, again, solicitors recommending me as a helpful, knowledgable and reliable expert witness.

Customers liked the personalised approach, the prompt service and the low-cost compared to their current vendor.

After two years of working from the garage (converted into a compliant secure lab on day one may I add), it was time to seek premises, which allowed the company to take on further clients.

I then added E-Discovery services to CFO, allowing many computers (and the E-Mail and documents stored on them) to be indexed (made keyword searchable) and responsive material produced for lawyer review.

This proved popular as I had no minimum charge (something most larger vendors do employ) so it was now cost effective to process a small office full of computers.

This led to working with some of the city's most prestigious law firms whose clients included the worlds largest software manufacturers, phramaceuticals, designer fashion houses and some of the most reknown architects in the UK.  Brand and IP protection was the theme, analysing computers seized from peddlars of counterfeit goods (on a massive warehouse/distribution network scale).

My next big break came from a borough of London's Trading Standards department, a large investigation into modified set-top TV boxes (pay per view) was underway and I became one of the experts involved in the case.

This was closely followed by an internal investigation within one of the UK's premier games software developers, from this point forward things simply mushroomed with clients returning time after time and referrals constantly occuring.

Where we are now......

CFO has now found its permanent home in my home town of Lowestoft on the east coast of England, where it resides in a secure facility which was previously the towns Police station.  Ironically in what used to be the custody suite - complete with cells !  A flashback to my Police days no less!

Friends, my peers and certain customers said the company would never work in Lowestoft, being outside of London (apparently where all work is centralised!).  They could not have been more wrong!

Travel has never been an issue, being 25 minutes away from an International airport and 2.5 hours on the train from London keeps reaction times low.  In addition CFO does not charge travel time to London, so this further convinced our London clients to use our services.

Year after year I have reinvested the company's profits back into the business, to ensure that it has comparable capability (and the industry standard equipment) to much larger competitors.

Whilst it is still myself carrying out all of the investigative work and writing the reports, on larger jobs I now have a small network of trusted experts that can be called on-board to assist when larger projects arrive.

Who are our clients......

Our customers include members of state, corporate businesses/laywers, criminal barristers, celebrities and other high net-worth individuals who demand a reactive service (usually same or next day).

Clients remain with us indefinetely - they just don't get the personal service and low cost elsewhere!.

The mission statement....

CFO is dedicated to providing its clients with personalised, innovative and cost effective solutions to their investigative needs - large or small.   But then everybods states that on their website!.....

Take a look at our Testimonials page to find out what our customers REALLY think and judge for yourself!

We are aimed at small to medium sized businesses who may have never been involved in any litigation or digital forensics processes - rest assured we will guide you through the process and help you avoid the common "Gotcha's" in a professional, diligent and non-patronising manner.

CFO strives to explain the somewhat daunting technical processes and terminology involved in our field, in plain jargon-free English.

Finally, I actually enjoy doing this and have done since the beginning in my Police days.  Every job is different, each client has needs different to that of the last.  Fashioning something to meet those needs is what makes me want to get up each morning and crack on with the next investigation!

Our Website Design.....

I have divided the website into a number of sections, each of which deals with common situations that you may encounter with your clients or employees.  Head over to the Services page and choose your sector to see what is on offer.

You will quickly realise that CFO's website is somewhat more verbose than those of our competitors.

I have intentionally explained our key services in a text rich style that we hope lends itself to friendly easy reading demonstrating our transparancy (this is not a black art after all!).

Whilst this may not be as pleasing to the eye or as minamalistic as trends dictate - we feel explaining something properly far outweighs aethstetics.

If you require more information on any of our services, call us FREE on (0800) 9996432 for a no obligation consultation - or visit the Contact Us page for other ways to get in touch. 

Finally, check out our Downloads section for various informative PDF's that give you more information about specific services we offer - with a flyer for certain services that you can print.