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reach of American justice, had given his résumé to Speakeasy during the extortion negotiations there.

Russian police had ignored a diplomatic request to detain and question Ivanov, and that was when the feds created Invita, a full-blown undercover business designed to lure the hacker into a trap. Now Ivanov and Gorshkov were surrounded by undercover FBI agents posing as company employees, along with a white-hat hacker from the nearby University of Washington who was playing the role of a computer geek named Ray. Hidden cameras and microphones recorded everything in the office, and FBI-installed spyware captured every keystroke typed on the computers. In the parking lot outside, around twenty FBI agents were standing by to help with the arrest.

The agent playing CEO Patterson tried to draw Gorshkov out some more. “What about credit cards? Credit card numbers? Anything like that?”

“When we’re here, we’ll never say that we got access to credit card numbers,” the hacker replied.

The FBI agent and Gorshkov laughed conspiratorially. “I understand. I hear ya, I hear ya,” said Patterson.

When the two-hour meeting concluded, Patterson ushered the men into a car, ostensibly to take them to the temporary housing arranged for their visit. After a short drive, the car stopped. Agents threw open the doors and arrested the Russians.

Back at the office, an FBI agent realized the keystroke logger installed on the bureau computers at Invita presented him with a rare opportunity. What he did next would make him the first FBI agent to be accused by the Russian federal police of committing a computer crime. He went into the keystroke logs and retrieved the password the pair had used to access their computer in Chelyabinsk. Then, after checking with his supervisor and a federal prosecutor, he logged in to the hackers’ Russian server over the Internet and started scrounging through the directory names, looking for the files belonging to Ivanov and Gorshkov.