At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone.

[…]

Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed Dex, heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity — vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors — targeting U.S. businesses and residents.

[…]

But a seven-week investigation by The Smoking Gun has begun to unravel Dex's organization and chronicle the sprawl of its criminality. The TSG probe has also stripped Pranknet's leader and some of his cohorts of their anonymity, which will likely come as welcome news to the numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, probing the group's activities.

[…]

With the case now moving outside the country, [Manchester, NH, Detective Peter] Marr contacted federal prosecutors for guidance. However, as Marr wrote in a May 6 report, It was obvious to me that the US Attorney's didn't have much interest in the case when I told them that the IP address of the suspect was in Canada. In shutting the case, Marr noted, At this time I have exhausted all leads and am closing the case due to not having the jurisdiction to continue further.