From Scroll to Evidence: An Android Forensics Investigation of UpScrolled App

Abstract

As dominant social media platforms face increasing regulatory and public scrutiny, UpScrolled has emerged as a notable alternative, characterized by an explicit “no-censorship” policy and the use of non-traditional recommendation algorithms to facilitate rapid user acquisition. However, the accelerated deployment of such platforms frequently outstrips the adoption of mature security and privacy controls, thereby creating ecosystems that may be vulnerable to exploitation by criminal actors. Despite UpScrolled's expanding user base, there is a conspicuous absence of documented digital forensic research focused on this application. This study presents a comprehensive forensic examination of UpScrolled artifacts on the Android operating system using a Samsung S7 mobile device as the test platform. Through the systematic simulation of representative user activities, we identified key forensic artifacts, most notably a local database that preserves detailed information on application notifications. Although peer-to-peer message artifacts were recovered, the associated data yielded only partial visibility into the content of user communications and did not fully reflect the entirety of the transmitted information. The results indicate that UpScrolled generates a comparatively limited forensic footprint relative to many established social networking applications, which may constrain investigators' capacity to reconstruct user behavior, particularly in scenarios where anti-forensic techniques are employed. This work contributes an initial artifact catalogue for UpScrolled and offers foundational guidance to digital forensic practitioners tasked with conducting investigations involving this platform.