Matthew Cox

And then the next step was to start tracing back the websites.

that they want like you know what i'm saying sorry well the funniest part about that though that you bring up is that the bad guys were all russians and we found that out later on so it was the russians sourcing to the chinese and using americans for customer service and also for other things now the way we trace back up to this we started we started with um with again with the the packages in china we start we figured out where a lot of that stuff was going

And then we started tracing IP addresses and the ISPs, which are the service someone would use to connect to the internet, and start finding commonalities within all those cases to find out how many parties we had.

And we could link, say, okay, these 17 emails came from this particular mail server.

and continue things like that and then we would collaborate with there's a there's a group called spam house which is s-p-a-m-h-a-w-h-a-u-s and they're a non-profit and they have a repository for a lot of these similar complaints and things like that and i worked with them and some of their volunteers as well to put together profiles for some of these folks

and figure out where these where these guys were.

And we did.

Now, one of them was a guy who was doing their this is a guy I caught working with.

Oh, no, I was working with the Missouri office of the FBI.

And we were working a case specifically following this one guy who was doing search engine optimization.

for those folks.

And back then is like 15 to 15.

Yeah, 1516 years ago, the Russians and the Chinese, they really didn't know how to optimize for Americans yet, for websites and things like that.

So they would hire Americans to do the search engine optimization for their products.

So I was able to trace their guy.

And it was the first case in any federal court where someone used Google Analytics numbers.

And a lot of times for your viewers that don't know what those are, if you right click on a website, you can click an option that says view source.

Then you look at all this jumbled code.

Inside that code is primarily what it takes to create what you see on the outside, the visual, you know, the nuts and bolts.

But there are also tracking codes in there so that people can count how many visitors go to their website and things like that.