PJ Vogt

The moral hazards were staggering.

And the FBI's attempt to negotiate all that, it actually helps explain what was happening with a criminal like Microsoft.

Why his deals kept getting confounded, even though he was never quite arrested.

The feds were invisibly managing the lives of many Microsofts, all the while getting a clearer, more high-res view into the modern crime world than perhaps anyone had ever glimpsed.

One of the big things they learned was just the sheer scale of the underworld.

Before Anam, Europol's best estimate was that the value of proceeds of crime in the EU was something like, in 2016, $122 billion.

That estimate turned out to be quite low.

So it's both the illegal world is bigger than we realized and there's more corruption than we thought.

For you as a person moving through the world, what is it like spending that much time inside the minds of people for whom, you know, murdering people is normal and something that they text about?

And what, sorry, several questions.

One is, what is the emoji for an assassination?

Or is it more like, good job killing him, smiley face?

But from a law enforcement perspective, like, if you have Microsoft ordering deaths on your phone network, aren't you—don't you need to do something about that?

Right.

You have to decide when the trap closes shut.

After the break, the trap does close shut.

The end of Operation Trojan Shield and a very bad day for some enthusiastic phone recommenders.

Let's after some ads.

Welcome back to the show.

Of all the criminals caught in Anam's dragnet, the one Joseph found most fascinating was Microsoft, the drug dealer of all trades who was one of Anam's biggest evangelists, accidentally leading so many of his friends and associates directly into the FBI's trap.