Eric Adams’ Indictment Reminds Us Deleting Texts Doesn’t Erase Them Forever

According to a five-count indictment that was unsealed last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan accuse Adams of illegally accepting travel perks and gifts from the Turkish government. The indictment uses detailed messages between Adams and his staff to build the case against him, and to show Adams’ alleged efforts to conceal misconduct from his phone.

As one example, the indictment cites an alleged 2019 text message exchange between the mayor and one of his staffers about a possible trip to Turkey.

“To be o[n the] safe side Please Delete all messages you send me,” the aide stated, per the indictment. Adams responded: “Always do.”

According to the indictment, Adams did not report any of gifts he received in 2019 from the airline manager or a Turkish entrepreneur on his annual disclosure form.

Adams had his cellphones confiscated as part of the investigation. We don’t know for sure how government officials would have been able to retrieve these deleted exchanges, but it’s a reminder that deleting your text messages doesn’t guarantee they are gone forever. Here’s why.

Your texts are hopefully not the subject of a federal inquiry, but there are probably times when you will want to delete private, embarrassing or awkward exchanges. Maybe you sent a text to the wrong group chat, or you want to forget something you sent your ex.

Regardless of what texts make you cringe in the present, understand that it is not easy to delete all evidence of a past text message. Deleting digital correspondence may make messages disappear from your view when you hit “delete,” but it won’t necessarily do the same for your recipient.

As Apple states, “You can’t delete messages, attachments and conversations for anyone else.” Newer iOS operating systems have editing and “unsend” features that can be used within short time limits, but there will still be evidence that you made changes. Participants can tap and see previous versions of your edited message, and a note that you unsent a message appears in both your and your recipient’s conversation transcripts.

Encrypted end-to-end messaging apps can go one step further and hide the identities of recipients and senders, as well as the actual contents of the messages. On an encrypted app like Signal, you can also use its “delete for everyone” feature, but it can only be done within 24 hours of a message being sent. And even if you use this feature within that time frame, there will still be metadata about the time the original message was sent and received.

“It’s safe to use encrypted apps because it protects you from other people, but no app is going to protect you from your own actions if you commit something down to written record, even if it’s encrypted,” said security architect and certified ethical hacker Maril Vernon. “Just assume it could be recovered.”

Even if you erase your phone and revert it to factory settings, the device’s previous activity can be restored. Apple says your iPhone, for example, can “store content, settings, and apps from a backup to a new or newly erased iPhone.” In other words, unless you’ve disabled the backup setting for iPhone Messages, an iCloud backup can easily retrieve those messages.

To Disable Messages, you would need to go to Settings, find your name and select iCloud. Then when you select Messages in iCloud, disable the option “Use on this iPhone.”

When she was interviewed by FBI agents about the mayor’s behavior, an Adams staffer reportedly excused herself to go to the bathroom and deleted an encrypted messaging app she “had used to communicate with Adams,” as well as a Turkish official and an airline manager, the indictment states.

But deleting entire apps is also not a foolproof way to erase suspicious activity.

“Just because you delete an app from your computer doesn’t delete the temporary storage or the local files that were created for that app,” Vernon said. “It’s pretty much always there, available for instant recall.”

Alfred Demirjian, founder and CEO of TechFusion, works in digital forensics and data recovery in Boston and has partnered with the government on cases. Demirjian said a forensics specialist like himself could retrieve deleted cellphone data. “There is no deletion or erase,” he said.

Demirjian explained that when you delete texts or other information off of your phone, that information does not literally disappear. It just signals to your device that the space this information took up can now be overwritten. Once you delete texts or apps, the first bit of “your data changes, but the rest has not changed until you override,” he said. “So that’s how you recover.”

“It’s really only in temporary storage on your phone. It’s not being deleted completely,” Vernon said. “It’s just being marked that this space could be used for future storage needs if that condition is met, but until that condition is met, that data is fully recoverable.”

Even if you delete, say, 30 gigabytes of messages, she said, “that piece of your storage pie is just being held in reserve.“

So “unless you know how to get to the boot memory of a device, you can’t do much else,” Vernon said. “You can’t determine in what order or how soon files are overwritten. The phone does that all by itself.”

“Even if they delete it from their cell phone, the data is somewhere else as well,” Demirjian said, noting that texts sent from your phone go through servers like Google, Verizon and Comcast.

“A log of this message was made not just on your phone, but on your carrier’s records,” Vernon said. “Your carrier can recover these for the police at any time, and they have to, because of record retention policies.”

For most people, all of this doesn’t apply, but understanding how your private messages can become public can help you be better informed about which sensitive information is better to share in person ― or not at all.

And if you’re ever on a bathroom break from your FBI interview about your and your boss’ alleged crimes, know that it’s too late to wipe your phone. The FBI likely will already have the information they want to talk with you about, Demirjian said.

At that point, he said, you are “really screwed.”