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At its peak, AlphaBay was 10x larger than Silk Road ever was. As a darknet marketplace that was, on a daily basis, facilitating the sale of $700,000 worth of drugs, guns, and other illegal items, it attracted the attention of a certain three-letter government agency, as you can imagine.
The FBI tried hard to find the owner of AlphaBay and lock him up. With the site being on the darknet, there wasn’t much that the feds could do to find the owner — as by design. They spent several years working on this case until they finally found a lead. The story continues with involvement from large corporations, the Canadian and Thai governments, and a coordinated raid on a villa in Thailand. After the raid, 25-year-old Alex Cazes was put in the back of a police car and put behind bars. They seized his computer, cars, house and interrogated his wife. With his knowledge of computer security, Alex managed to run one of the most powerful drug cartels from his laptop. But alas, his knowledge wasn’t enough: the feds got him and locked him up. Alex killed himself a few days after the arrest.
Do you want to guess how they got him?
He left his email address in the “from” field of the welcome email you receive when signing up for AlphaBay. Microsoft, who owns Hotmail, happily gave Alex’s information to the FBI, and the rest is history.
A few weeks ago, I decided to download a dating app. After some mindless swiping, I came across this one profile that had an Instagram username in its bio. Let’s call her Mary. Mary put it there, I presume, for people to look her up and follow her. Curious, I Googled her username, and sure enough, her Instagram popped up with a myriad of publicly-available photos on display. This is
