PJ Vogt

In your reporting, you focus on Microsoft, but the sense I got is that the authorities were also focusing on Microsoft, that of all the sort of dots on the map that they could pay attention to, it almost, I got the sense that at some point they were almost like playing God with him and like Old Testament God with him in a really unusual way.

And the idea is that the more they fuck with him, the more he has to reach out to other people to do more business with.

And he's like a barium that is going through this criminal network and they're going to see more and more of it.

It's just funny.

I've had spells in my life where I felt

like something beyond me was confounding every, like every time I needed luck to work out, it didn't.

But it's never been the case that there was actually someone pulling the strings to mess with me.

It's just strange to think that once for someone that was actually the case.

So Microsoft, how does Microsoft find out?

Does he find out from the press conference?

Like at what point does he finally realize like, oh, the thing everyone was saying to me was in fact true?

As criminals all over the world were arrested, suspicions grew.

But nobody knew for sure that Anam was an FBI operation until that gleeful San Diego press conference with the U.S.

attorney announcing the program's success and finally closing the trap.

According to Joseph, part of the FBI's calculation for ending the operation, weirdly, had just been due to the overwhelming success of Anam.

Towards the end, so many criminals were on the network, sending so many millions of texts, that for the government, just monitoring them and preventing murders was beginning to require too much manpower.

So, after about three years of running Anam, that's why the FBI decided to shut it down.

By the time of that press conference announcing the trap, over 800 arrests had been made.

But I was surprised to learn that Microsoft and his buddy, Hakan Ayyek, were not among them.

Despite being high-value targets, they'd slip the net, at least at first.