Thread by @WIRED

AlphaBay was the largest online drug and crime bazaar in history, run by an elusive mastermind who seemed untouchable. Now the world-shifting story of how a dark web goliath fell to a scrappy group of detectives is finally being told.
🎨: @hogingkim
wired.com/story/alphabay… 1/8

Alexandre Cazes lived what the Thai people called the “chill-chill” life: He only left the house for dinner with his wife, errands, and privately, prolific womanizing.

But he had another secret: He was also the kingpin behind the biggest dark web black market of all time. 2/8

While real-life Cazes zoomed through the streets at triple-digit speeds in his Lamborghini, his online persona was Alpha02— the anonymous founder of the dark web black market AlphaBay that made the infamous Silk Road pale in comparison. 3/8

Cazes believed, as many did before him, that crypto’s anonymity paired with genius technological ability would protect him—but just as crypto had opened up new markets for criminals, so had it opened up new opportunities for law enforcement. 4/8

AlphaBay’s security seemed impenetrable—until a small team from a dusty central California city received a fortuitous tip: Years ago, a quickly-fixed server misconfiguration had briefly exposed the sender of the AlphaBay welcome email: [e-mail] 5/8

The team used that email to dig through piles of social media and internet history—mostly finding Cazes numbingly unsuspecting. But one Internet Archive dig turned up something interesting: a deleted profile that showed he had written on a forum under another name: Alpha02. 6/8

The team knew from previous cases the tall order ahead: They would need dead-to-rights evidence and access to his laptop—while he was using it. But simultaneously, a still more daring bust was in progress: one that would change their trajectory and the dark web forever. 7/8

Read the first installment of Andy Greenberg’s unbelievable tale of the biggest dark web bust of all time, and sign up for our newsletter to receive the next five parts of the series weekly. wired.com/story/alphabay… 8/8