A verified complaint alleges that Alexandre Cazes, an alleged criminal mastermind with $23 mln worth of assets, bragged about a purchase of a Porsche Panamera on the Roosh V forum where he shared details of the purchase which led to his arrest. He also took a video of himself driving the Porsche after other members of the forum did not believe his claim.
Cazes was an AlphaBay administrator who was allegedly collecting tens of millions of dollars in commissions from the illegal transactions facilitated by Alphabay via two to four percent commission on sales, according to the official complaint that was dated July 19, 2017.
Cazes’s amassed wealth
A complete breakdown of his cryptocurrency was included in the official complaint.
Documented details about various assets that made up the Cazes’s net worth were found by law enforcement officials. This includes a total amount of $8.8 mln worth of digital assets and bank accounts, cryptocurrency exchange accounts and properties owned by Cazes.
According to the complaint, federal agents obtained the warrants by tracing a number of Bitcoin transactions from AlphaBay to multiple accounts held by Cazes and his wife. The accused admin is also said to have laundered his money through an entity called EBX Technologies.
Law enforcement apprehended the cryptocurrency wallets that were in Cazes’s computer.
Buy-bust operation leading to his arrest
Law enforcement claim that they purchased various forms of contraband from the website during the time of the investigation. They also learned that a welcome email for AlphaBay forum included Cazes’s personal email in the header back in December 2014, but they claimed they learned of this only in 2016.
New members of the forum entered their private email accounts in which they were greeted with an email address of “[email protected].” Then the law enforcement was able to connect Cazes to the email address in the AlphaBay emails.
Cazes was logged into AlphaBay as “admin” when he was arrested in Thailand. Also, he was also logged into AlphaBay to fix a site outage caused by the law enforcement.