Yes, I mean before that this group of friends now gets together, and I mean some of them are professionally involved in the civil case, right? And like, who exactly is in this group of friends and why do they take an interest in this case?

Yeah, so we have Brian Holm, which is, he's the lawyer for the simple case, one of the lawyers for that case, who eventually becomes the lead lawyer in this case. And he's been looking into Girls Do Foreign for years since like 2015. And then we have, let's see, who else? Charles de Barber, who is, he's an Ozent expert, really interesting, fun guy, considering his background. Let me just pull it up because I want to read straight from it. He's like, let's see. He was former US Army in senior signals intelligence. He was an analyst, was deployed in Iraq, became a member of the first Army cyber brigade, and his call sign in the military was Sly Fox. Which is so fantastic. When you kind of see a picture of him, there's a picture of him in the article, but also he's all over the internet. But he's got like a page boy hat and is usually wearing a bow tie and it's just got like a big smile on. And he's actually a really fun guy to talk to, but looking at his credentials, it's like, okay, this guy means business. And he does, really good at his job. Then you have Ben Owen, who is part of a show called Hunted, which has a couple different versions in the UK and elsewhere. Australia has one. But Hunted is like a show where you like there, maybe people who listen to this podcast would be familiar with Hunted, but you like have a bunch of people who are pretending to be fugitives and they run around the world. And then these other hunters chase them down. So Ben is a former military sniper and British intelligence. Now he works on cyber And then his fiance, Danny Brooke, who was one of the most deployed women in the UK as an undercover officer as part of the London Met. She joined when she was 18 and she would go and infiltrate organized crime groups and kind of live as one of them. So real badass. And then we have her daughter Amelia, who's a teenager, and she stepped in when their original Spanish translator fell through. So none of them speak fluent Spanish or fluent enough to get around doing the kind of human intelligence that they needed to do. So she came along and was a huge help because she could go into these places that they maybe wouldn't be trusted in or couldn't as this young woman and just say, Hey, we're looking for this guy who's done a bunch of sex crimes. Can you help us as like a very charming, friendly, unassuming young woman. And then of course, people are super happy to help her. So yeah, that's the crew. And

why are they all taking an interest in this beyond, of course, the lawyer, which I think the connection is obvious because he wants to do the best job for his clients. Why are the other people getting involved?

Yeah, so Ben and Charles met each other on Hunted. And then Danny and Ben also met on Hunted, but at a different time. And then that's how they got together, and now they're engaged. And then Amelia is Danny's daughter, obviously. And then Charles and Ben, Charles and, sorry. I need like a whiteboard with a bunch of maps in it.

Charles and- There are a lot of names and I think when you read the piece, like it's actually not confusing, but when you're saying it out loud, it can be confusing. It's confusing. Yeah. But

they all, they all know each other through this mutual connection of like they, they saw what happened to these women. It pissed them off massively and they have these really specific set of skills that they can put to use and they were like you know what let's just go get this guy let's figure this out yeah I

I don't think we're even allowed to say certain set of skills because we're gonna get sued by like whatever like I don't know if you're allowed to do that. But anyway, so as you say, yes, exactly. It's the real life version of that, basically, in a way. So they have a few options of countries. And then you mentioned Barcelona just briefly, if you know, like, why does that come up as sort of a starting point?

so they had a few leads before they left for Barcelona and one of them was they had found as part of his, you know, they tracked him down through being a customer of Ledger, which is a crypto wallet company. And he was using an alias in Ledger named Mark Williamson. And if you remember, in 2020, Ledger got hacked and exposed the names of lots of its customers, along with physical addresses, which is really bad, just by the way. But they found that name and that address at a shipping store called Mailboxes, et cetera, where he had mailed some stuff from there. And they were like, well, okay, he was definitely here physically at some point. was using this shipping location to get ledger crypto wallet deliveries. In Barcelona. You get that in the mail. He had picked it up there. They were like, he's probably somewhere nearby there. They knew that he was really obsessed with Air Jordans, and there's a really hot market for Air Jordans in this particular store in Barcelona. And laughing because it's so crazy that this man was like the mastermind is too nice of a word. He's like a bumbling mess of a dude who's going around looking for rare shoes while he's a fugitive from the FBI. I would be lying lower than that. But I guess he's got his interest. And they also knew he was really into hiring sex workers, which is a big market for that in Barcelona. It was just a lot of things that they were like, okay, it makes sense for him to be hiding out here. He's like, he loves going to the club. You know, it's like, there's a lot of that in Barcelona. He likes weed. There's a lot of that in Barcelona. Just painting a picture. He likes to gamble. I don't know, I feel like I'm giving a bad impression of Barcelona. It's a beautiful city, but... No,

no, no, no, we get it. It's very, very particular on just this one, actually, very horrific story. You're not talking about the city. But so, yes, they have a Huntress Pass loan. They go there as a group and they sort of set up shop, I think was in a hotel or a library, but they have almost like a war room, right? And they're figuring out what to do, where to go next. What are some of the leads that they start pulling now that they're on the ground in Barcelona?

Yeah, so the first thing they do basically is just walk around. They're like, if we had to retrace his day, what would he do? Like, where would he go to eat? Where would he go to the grocery store? Where would he go to pick up his mail? Blah, blah, blah. They go to cafes, they go to bars, they check out like Australian and New Zealand football bars and pubs where that's, you know, people gather to watch that. I don't know anything about any of that. But they just kind of walked around and got a lay of the land. One of the first things they did was go to the mailboxes, et. store. And when they went there, they met the person who staffed that store. And they're like, okay, great. There's a guy here who must have someone here must have seen him, because you can't just go in and like do it without interacting with another person. And just randomly on that day, as it happened, like by sheer luck, the person working that day had seen Pratt, and was like, oh, yeah, I remember that guy. He, like, looked a mess and smelled bad. We

got our guy. That's him.

We got it. Yeah. They were like, Oh my. And they were like, Holy shit. There is that's this perfect description of him. And everyone that like so many people that they talked to who had like physical like eyes on Pratt at some point described him that way. It was like disheveled, was carrying around a lot of cash like in a nice designer bag, like a Louis Vuitton bag, but looked like he doesn't shower or bathe and smells weird. And yeah, it's just like a creepy dude. I love, Charles had a great quote in this story. He was like, if you look at his picture and look in the mirror three times and say moist, that's who appears as his prat. gross, a gross dude in so many ways, but yeah, they went to the Modbox store, they went to a shoe store that sold Air Jordans to try to find like the big seller of this particular rare shoe. She had seen him pretty recently and you know, was like, yeah, totally know who you're talking about. He was definitely here. And then their most, like their strongest kind of lead was, they went to a nightclub. And we're asking all the security guards, you know, have you seen this guy, and they had seen him a week prior. So he was just there. And went there all the time, and would just like sit and order Hennessy and Red Bull, which again, gross. Nothing against Red Bull. Love a Red Bull. Really weird mixture. And they

were like, yeah. I'm letting you disparage the drinks. I'll let you do that. Yeah.

He would sit in the back and drink his Henne and Red Bull and with his bag of cash and try to pick up women. And they were like, yeah, we know that guy because he's weird and gross. So, yeah, they were like, oh my God, he's been here very recently. really close to interacting with him, you know, physically and putting a hand on his shoulder and saying, you know, we're, we know who you are. We're reporting you to the police. Yeah.

Crazy. Yeah. And they're handing out, they're handing out photos of him to bouncers and all of that sort of thing. It sounds like they're just like one step behind him, basically, but they, confirmed, essentially, that Pratt is either in Barcelona or was here super, super recently. So obviously they can't go around and start arresting people. They're private citizens basically on a holiday, you know, a working holiday, but they're on holiday. And so what do they do? Do they give the information to the FBI then leave? Like what do they do with this information?

So the whole time they had been feeding this information back to the FBI and to the Spanish police. And even the FBI can't do something about it if they know where he is. It's like they can tell the local authorities, hey, our guy is there, we want him extradited, can you arrest him please? But they can't actually go to another country and say, we're bringing him back. So they were really reliant on the Spanish police force, which I mean, they had a lot to say about the Spanish police, and none of it was particularly positive. They were very frustrated by the fact that they hadn't gotten any of this information, and whereas if they showed up just at random, not random, but like they just showed up and got lucky several times in a row, whereas the police really were kind of sitting on their hands about this. So yeah, they passed all the information along, especially like the ID that they got from the mailboxes store and they said, you know, please do what you will with this, but you know, this is all we could do. So they went home, they kept at it, you know, home kept working for the victims. DeBarber kept looking for any kind of trace of him online. And then, um, then Danny and Amelia went, they live in Spain, so they went home and then they also, they had business in like Thailand, like they were flying around doing international, you know, TV spy shit with their cool lives. So they split ways and they didn't hear anything for a few months until Christmas time of that year.