Federal law enforcement made public the financial scale of Alexandre Cazes's alleged criminal enterprise today through a verified forfeiture complaint. Cazes, identified as a top administrator of the
Federal law enforcement made public the financial scale of Alexandre Cazes's alleged criminal enterprise today through a verified forfeiture complaint. Cazes, identified as a top administrator of the darknet marketplace AlphaBay, had accumulated approximately $23 million in total assets by the time authorities arrested him. Of that sum, roughly $8.8 million existed in the form of cryptocurrency tokens—Bitcoin, Ether, Zcash, and Monero combined.
The takedown became official at a press conference featuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other law enforcement representatives. The complaint itself bears a July 19, 2017 timestamp. Its pages reveal that Cazes enriched himself substantially through AlphaBay's commission structure, taking between two and four percent from every transaction flowing through the marketplace. This mechanism had funneled tens of millions into his personal coffers.
Documents recovered from Cazes's computer painted a clear picture of his digital holdings. Authorities found he possessed approximately 1,605 Bitcoin, 8,309 Ether, 3,691 Zcash, and an unspecified quantity of Monero. These figures include tokens extracted from AlphaBay's own servers, which held close to 12,000 Monero. The valuations placed these digital assets at roughly $8.8 million total. Beyond cryptocurrency, agents seized tangible wealth including real estate, motor vehicles, and access to traditional bank accounts and digital currency exchange portfolios.
The complaint states: "Federal agents obtained the warrants [for cryptocurrency exchange accounts and bank accounts] after tracing a number of Bitcoin transactions originating with AlphaBay to digital currency accounts, and ultimately bank accounts and other tangible assets, held by Cazes and his wife." Cazes had additionally attempted to obscure his earnings through automated coin mixing and tumbling services. His money flowed through a business entity called EBX Technologies as part of his laundering infrastructure. Officers discovered a text file containing private key information for his offline wallet storage on his computer—seizure of which gave them access to additional cryptocurrency reserves.
Law enforcement records indicate Cazes boasted about acquiring a Porsche Panamera on the Roosh V forum, even sharing purchase documentation and video evidence when skeptics doubted his claim. During investigations into AlphaBay's operations, agents personally procured illicit goods including marijuana, heroin, and counterfeit identification documents directly from the marketplace.
Building their case against Cazes proved methodical. A welcome email circulated to new AlphaBay forum members in December 2014 contained his personal email address embedded in its header information. Though discovered in 2016, the message read: "Once new users joined the forums and entered their private email accounts, they were greeted with an email directly from AlphaBay welcoming them to the forums. The email address of '[email protected]' was included in the header information of the AlphaBay welcome email." The same address materialized again in correspondence related to password recovery processes.
Further investigation located a post on www.commentcamarche.com attributed to "alpha02"—AlphaBay's administrative username—that explicitly mentioned both "Alexandre Cazes" and the previously identified email. At the moment of his arrest in Thailand, Cazes maintained an active session logged into AlphaBay under the administrator account. He had been attempting to restore service to the marketplace following an outage that law enforcement themselves had engineered.
These investigative techniques echoed the government's successful prosecution of Ross Ulbricht in the Silk Road matter. Then too, authorities had relied on connecting email addresses to real identities, analyzing historical forum activity, and capturing the subject actively administering the darknet operation to construct their case.
