Stacey Whitaker

I think one of the biggest breakthroughs came from Owen at AOL.

So I'll let him talk about that.

And that's what Brian was referring to earlier when he was talking about, you know, we're doing all this legal process and we're at that time getting some pushback on why are you continuing to capture all this data?

It's because, yeah, it's all encrypted and we're not getting a lot out of it, but we have to continue capturing it, watching for those one little mishaps where they make a mistake.

That's the only time we can get information that is going to reveal to us who these people are.

We also had a title three on one of the main email accounts as well.

So we were watching the email coming through too.

And even though it was encrypted, the body of the email was encrypted, but the email title, the email headers was not.

So we would get the title of the email.

And that was the only information that we would see was just the title.

So they were using an email service that we were able to gather information from as well.

And so we literally had over 16,000 emails that we had to sit and review every single one, pulling out victim information, pulling out money mule information and information on money transactions and gathering all of that data together too to be used later on down the road in trial.

So I like to refer to what Brian's talking about when this guy comes to Miami as Christmas in May.

We were so excited for this to happen.

We only had, I think, about maybe a 10-day lead that he was coming to the United States.

And we had to put together an operation to gather as much information on him as we possibly could when he was here.

And we had 10 days to prepare to do that.

We did, yes.

We were down in Miami, both of us, with a whole group of support people from the Miami division as well as from FBI headquarters to, as Brian said, we were going to do a search warrant on every device that he had.

We were hoping it was going to be a lot of devices.