THE FAKE WORD LOCAL AMI OFFICE
AKE WORDS CRACKING THE CASES
THE MEETINGS WERE SET for motels, parking lots and other poorly lit locations where the suspects figured they could make a quick getaway, if needed.
Using illicit websites that advertise the sale of illegal acts, the would-be customers made these arrangements all over metro Milwaukee – from many spots inside the city to Oak Creek to Brookfield.
Having committed this same crime several times before and even multiple times a day, the perpetrators expected a simple transaction: Sex in exchange for money.
But that wouldn’t be happening tonight. Instead, when the suspects arrive, dozens of FBI agents swarm them, cut off any chance of escape, then quickly detain and arrest some. Unlike the prostitution stings you’ve seen on TV, however, the whole incident happens quickly and quietly. “We’re not guns out, we’re not screaming – it’s nothing like that,” says Jason J. Soule, a supervisory special agent with the Milwaukee field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We immediately identify who we are, so there’s less risk of some sort of escalation. Then once the victims are in the room, they can breathe easy, knowing that they’re with law enforcement.”
The victims Soule mentions weren’t always viewed as such – these men and women, who are often young and sometimes minors, aren’t selling their bodies because they want to. They’ve been kidnapped, coerced, threatened and/or beaten into submitting themselves to prostitution. “We consider them victims now, so we’re not citing them, not arresting them,” says Soule, a 15-year veteran of the FBI. “We’re trying to stop that cycle, and we do that by trying to get them services” like help for mental health or substance abuse.
The real targets are “the ones directing this kind of behavior. We’re after the traffickers,” Soule says. “If we can put them away and give this person [the trafficking victim] a second chance, we’ve done our job.”
The action in Milwaukee last August – which netted three traffickers and identified six victims, including one minor – was part of an annual, nationwide sting known as Operation Cross Country. It’s just one example of the wide-ranging, versatile work that the FBI’s 200-plus local agents, analysts and other employees do out of their lakeshore headquarters in St. Francis.
The unifying theme to the Bureau’s nine investigative priorities – terrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, cybercrime, public corruption, civil rights, organized crime, white-collar crime and violent crime – is the need for high levels of resources, and that the crimes tend to cross state lines or threaten national security.
Soule says whether it’s the hyper-local efforts of the national human trafficking sting or a drug or health care fraud case, the FBI’s work not only captures offenders but also deters future criminals from following in their footsteps. “We’ll hit the streets using good old-fashioned police work or we’ll do proactive undercover operations,” he says. “We’re stopping that cycle and then getting that level of cooperation that can build on our cases.”
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, Milwaukee has been ground zero for a sweeping international investigation of dark-web commerce called Operation Cookie Monster.
The local field office opened the case in 2018 and directed an investigation that included 45 of the FBI’s 56 field offices, 14 partner countries and more than 500 “law enforcement actions” such as arrests, searches and interviews. The investigation is still ongoing.
The probe – named for internet cookies, which are small bits of private data like usernames and passwords – began when FBI agents here identified a massive digital criminal commerce website. Hackers used the sprawling “dark web” marketplace called Genesis Market to sell an estimated 80 million pieces of stolen access credentials and so-called “digital fingerprints” that granted criminals access to everything from compromised Netflix and email accounts to bank accounts. When the FBI took down the site, some 59,000 cybercriminals were accessing and buying stolen data.
“It could be used for lower-level identity theft and fraud, all the way up to initial access for ransomware attacks,” says Amanda Knutson, the supervisory special agent overseeing the Milwaukee FBI cybercrime division.
According to news reports, Genesis sellers reaped some $9 million in cryptocurrency from selling users’ online credentials. “Bot” programs used to steal such data went for as much as $450 each, while passwords could be found for as little as $5 each. Officials estimated the total financial losses for people whose information had been compromised was as much as tens of millions of dollars.
“The extent of it was worldwide. It impacted victims in almost every country,” Knutson says. “The reason [this case] came to Milwaukee is because we have some excellent, forward-leaning agents who identified the issue and took the initiative to investigate it.”
Genesis and sites like it have contributed to exponential increases in cybercrimes over the years, says Knutson. “I don’t see cybercrime decreasing anytime soon because the threshold for entry for a cybercriminal is so much lower than it used to be, because they have these criminal services that are available to them,” Knutson says. “Somebody who’s interested in making money doesn’t necessarily need to be able to code their own malware or need to be able to get initial access to a company. They don’t need to set up their own infrastructure. They can purchase or rent all of this stuff on the dark web.”
BEYOND LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS like Cross Country and Cookie Monster, there are dozens of local FBI agents chasing down leads and exploring a wide range of crimes and potential threats, says special agent in charge Michael Hensle, who has led the Milwaukee FBI office since January 2022.
Given the cost in human and financial resources of FBI investigations (the bureau’s 2023 budget was $10.8 billion), the threshold for cases it takes is equally high. “There has to be a violation of federal law that we can investigate,” he says, such