Stacey Whitaker

and kept working at and kept collecting information, even though I was very limited in what I could do.

I was talking with the, I mean, we did have an FBI office in Bucharest in Romania.

And so I was sending information to our FBI office over there to try to, initially it was simply sending them information on the money mules that were picking up the money.

So I was able to track the money being sent via Western Union.

And initially it was getting picked up in Greece, and then it was in Hungary, and then it was Romania.

It was several different countries in Europe where money was getting picked up.

So I didn't necessarily know at first that it was Romania, but most of the money mules were using Romanian IDs when they would pick up the money.

So for five years, all I'm really able to collect for the most part is victim information, right?

I'm creating the spreadsheet of all these different victims that I've identified.

I'm identifying money mule accounts or IDs and money transactions, and I'm collecting all of that information.

I bring in CSIPs eventually to help on the legal side.

And then I end up talking with Liam again in 2012, who connects us with Owen.

And at this point, I'm figuring out that this is a very sophisticated group.

that we're dealing with, obviously, especially from all the work that Liam had already done.

I knew, you know, although I was on the cyber squad in Cleveland, I didn't have a super techie background, certainly a little bit, but nowhere near as much as Ryan.

So I definitely needed some help on that side of things.

And so I asked Ryan to work on this case with me.

We were doing all of those things.

We were collecting information from Romania.

We were collecting it from Liam.