I don't have the details specifically for that one, but you are right that they take a lot of time and can often require several investigators to be involved at the same time.
In general terms, an investigation is going to start with the intelligence we have in the spam reporting centre or elsewhere, but we need to be able to validate all that information. In the case of a legitimate company that's sending out messages, we need to ask them to get their consent records. There can often be millions of records, so we're talking about a spreadsheet with millions of lines for each email: who they're sending emails to, when their business relationship was established, and things of that nature.
Going through all of that information obviously takes time. We need to then also contact any complainants we may have and get witness statements to validate and corroborate the other information we have. It's a long process, and when we get into cases that are multi-party, such as the coupons investigation that I referred to earlier, then you have several legal entities that you're looking into at the same time, and people in different jurisdictions. In that case we had one American and one Canadian. It necessarily takes a little longer when we're dealing with partners in the U.S., for example.