New Smithsonian exhibit puts CMU’s logo on display

A new exhibit featuring a laptop adorned with Central Michigan University’s logo was recently unveiled at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History. There, it’ll be on display for at least a decade.

The laptop’s CMU connection began one fateful Thursday night at a coed accounting fraternity event.

That evening, an FBI special agent pitched government work to Alpha Psi. In attendance was Chris Janczewski, who picked accounting as his major because he said it was a readily employable degree.

Janczewski said he was intrigued by the idea and set his sights on a career catching criminals. After graduation in 2006, he worked for the IRS as a tax auditor but moved to criminal investigations to become a special agent after a few years.

The laptop with CMU’s Action C signature mark over the C key was instrumental to his work, particularly a Bitcoin theft case that became the focus of a Netflix documentary called Biggest Heist Ever and a yet-to-be-released limited series on Hulu.

The exhibit is about the history of money, and Janczewski’s IRS-issued laptop was incorporated to demonstrate how money evolved from tablets and giant, stationary stone wheels to digital currency.

Normally, the IRS wouldn’t let someone decorate one of its laptops, he said. However, since the laptop was used for undercover work, the agency was more relaxed about enforcing those rules.

The IRS Criminal Investigations Division focuses on the money side of crime, he said. He often worked as part of a team of investigators from other agencies like the FBI and the. They’d build a criminal case doing what he was trained to do on day one.

“Follow the money,” he said he was told.

He followed the money on a case that helped him bring down the dark net’s largest child trafficking ring, operated by someone living in South Korea, he said. The takedown led to the rescue of 25 children and more than 340 arrests around the world.

The case was featured in the best-selling book “Tracers in the Dark.”  For his contributions, the Secretary of the Treasury awarded Janczewski the Meritorious Service Award in 2019.   

He also helped break up terrorist financing rings linked to Hamas, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. He also investigated multi-hundred-million-dollar thefts by North Korean spies.

After he helped start the IRS-CI’ cybercrimes unit in 2015, Janczewski began working on cases involving cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

A year later, a married couple began swiping Bitcoins off a virtual exchange in Hong Kong. By the time Janczewski helped bust them in 2022, the value of the stolen cryptocurrency went from $71 million to $3.6 billion.

He’d also since decorated the C key of his laptop with a sticker of CMU’s Action C, which his wife first saw as part of a Facebook alumni group and purchased as a Christmas gift from an Etsy vendor.

The sticker highlights the influence his time at CMU had on his law enforcement career.

“Going to Central Michigan was a pivotal point in my life,” he said. “IRS-CI took it to another level.  I love how this laptop was able to help bring my career as a special agent full-circle with my time at CMU.”