Content Warning: The the story told here includes references to suicide and child abuse, although the abuse is not described graphically.
Early one fall morning in 2017, in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, Chris Janczewski stood alone in the doorway of a home he wasn’t invited to enter.
Moments earlier, armed Homeland Security Investigations agents in ballistic vests had taken up positions around the neat two-story brick house, pounded on the front door, and when a family member living there opened it, burst in. Janczewski, a criminal investigator with the Internal Revenue Service, followed quietly behind. Now he found himself at the entrance, in the eye of a flurry of activity, watching as agents searched the premises and seized electronic devices.
They separated the family, putting the father, an assistant principal at the local high school and the subject of their investigation, in one room; his wife in another; the two children in third. An agent turned on a TV and turned it on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in an attempt to distract the children from the invasion of their home and the questioning of their parents.
Janczewski had come to this attack only as an observer, a visitor who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to observe and advise the local homeland security team as it carried out its mandate. But Janczewski’s investigation was what brought the agents here, to this average-looking house with a well-kept yard among all the average-looking houses they could search anywhere in America. He had led them there based on a strange, nascent form of evidence. Janczewski had traced the links on the Bitcoin blockchain, pulling that chain until it connected this ordinary home to an extremely cruel place on the Internet — and then connected that place to hundreds of other people around the world. All complicit in the same massive web of unspeakable violence. All are now on Janczewski’s long list of targets.
Over the previous few years, Yanchevski, his partner Tigran Gambarian and a small group of investigators from a growing list of three-letter US agencies had used this newfound technique, tracking cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But these methods never led them to a case like this, where the fate of so many people, both victims and perpetrators, seemed to depend on the findings of this new form of forensics. That morning’s search in a suburb near Atlanta was the first time those stakes became real for Janczewski. It was, as he would later put it, a “proof of concept.”
From where Janczewski was stationed at the front of the house, he could hear the Homeland Security agents talking to the father, who answered in a broken, resigned voice. In another room, he heard the agents questioning the man’s wife; she replied that yes, she had found certain images on her husband’s computer, but he told her that he downloaded them by accident when he was pirating music. And in the third room, he could hear the two elementary school-aged children—children more or less the same age as Yanchevski’s—watching television. They asked for a snack, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy that had unfolded for their family.
Janczewski remembers the gravity of the moment that hit him: This was a high school administrator, husband and father of two. Whether he was guilty or innocent, the accusations that this team of law enforcement officers were bringing against him—their very presence in his home—would almost certainly ruin his life.
Janczewski thought back to the method of investigation that had led them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world. He hoped, not for the last time, that it hadn’t let him down.
