Naked Pizza snagged Evan. But the legwork was done by Jeff Reifman, who was using twitter under @vanishteam. He has just put up an amazing post detailing exactly what he did and how he did it. The post should be read in full.
The quick summary:
* Reifman noticed the similarity between a Facebook account under the name gatzjd and the image of Evan as he was interviewed about swine flu in Santa Monica by Amanda Congdon. (People will notice that James Gatz is the original name of James Gatsby, in the masterpiece of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of Evan's favorite authors).
* Reifman then figured out that the Facebook page was owned by the same person who had a protected Twitter account under the name jdgatz.
* Jdgatz didn't have many followers, and since the account was protected Reifman couldn't follow it directly, even under a fake name. So Reifman called all the followers that jdgatz had already accepted, including a realtor in Hawaii with more than 50,000 followers. She agreed to pass along all of Gatz/Evan's tweets.
* Getting access this way, Reifman realized that Evan was tweeting about his actual locations under this protected, pseudononymous account. He also learned, from this, that Evan had shaved his head.
* Meanwhile, Reifman also found a protected tumblr account, bespect.com, which had been registered by "James Gatz."
* Knowing all this, Reifman was able to capture some legitimate, uncloaked IP addresses of computers Evan had used. So, he was able to trace him to Atlanta, and then to New Orleans. He baited his trap by continually posting to Twitter that he was revealing big clues about Evan on his Facebook page – knowing that Evan's Facebook alias would check in on them, giving Reifman another chance to track the IP addresses.
* Last night, Evan unprotected his Twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot. He learned from this that Evan had started following @nakedpizza in New Orleans.
* Reifman alerted the employees of Naked Pizza and then worked with them throughout the day to set up the sting operation that eventually caught Evan heading to a reading. He was assisted in this by several other trusted hunters who he had let in on his findings. Apparently, he spoke on the phone with Nakedpizza at least 10 times today.
But read the whole post. You'll see exactly what happened and you'll get to see all of Evan's tweets, including those from the day he worked as a beer salesman at an NFL game!
Congratulations to @vanishteam and thank you to all the hunters who made this such a wonderful experiment. Make sure to pick up the December issue of Wired, in which Evan will explain everything he did on the run and what it felt like to try to shed his skin and live as someone else.
