11 July 2022
July 11, 2022
Emilia Sercan is a Romanian investigative journalist specialized in plagiarism in doctoral dissertations. During the past seven years, she has exposed around 50 individual cases of plagiarism in doctoral dissertations of top Romanian politicians, including the current Prime Minister, ministers of the parliament, politicians, intelligence generals, army generals, police quaestors, professors, prosecutors, and judges. Emilia is a well known journalist in the region and a thorn in the eye of the power elite in Romania.
A few months ago, five private pictures of Emilia, taken 20 years ago, were stolen and uploaded to a Moldovan site to damage her reputation as an investigative journalist. When Emilia reported the case to the police, they responded quickly with a 29 pages report, concluding that the site Patrianoastra[.]com was the source of the leak and not the Moldovan site that she claimed. It was not only odd that the police responded so quickly and resourcefully to a case of defamation of a female journalist, but there was also something odd about some of the content published on the “Patria Noastra” site…
Qurium’s investigation shows how time traveling was used to hide the origin of the leak and how the police seemed to have special powers to find the “ghost” website “Patria Noastra” when it was really needed. A website that not even Google could find.
Qurium forensics report: The kompromat Delorean – How to hide the source of a defamation campaign against investigative journalist Emilia Șercan
Contacts
Digital forensics: Tord Lundström, t@virtualroad.org, Technical Director
Media: Clara Zid info@virtualroad.org, Media and Outreach Manager