AlphaBay Owner Used Email Address For Both AlphaBay and LinkedIn Profile.

BarbaraHudson writes: The Register is reporting that Alexandre Cazes, the 25-year-old Canadian running the dark web site AlphaBay, was using a hotmail address easily connected to him via his Linkdin profile to administer the site. From the report: "[A]ccording to U.S. prosecutors, he used his real email address, albeit a Hotmail address -- Pimp_Alex_91@hotmail.com -- as the administrator password for the marketplace software. As a result, every new user received a welcome email from that address when they signed up to the site, and everyone using its password recovery tool also received an email from that address. However, rather than carefully set up and then abandon that email address, it turns out that Alexandre Cazes -- Pimp Alex -- had been using that address for years. Cazes had also used his Pimp Alex Hotmail address as well as an email address from his own business -- EBX Technologies -- to set up online bank accounts and crypto-currency accounts. How did law enforcement know that Cazes was behind EBX Technologies? It was on his LinkedIn profile."

BarbaraHudson adds: "His laptop wasn't encrypted, so expect more arrests as AlphaBay users are tracked down."

Comments

Dupe Dupe Dupe

[ELCouz]

n/t

Re:Dupe Dupe Dupe

[BarbaraHudson]

The original summary didn't cover how easy it was to trace the guy. The FBI's "investigative prowess" was nothing more than a search for his email address on LinkedIn. That also yielded his business, which another search of available public government records would have yielded his home address, etc.

You can go here, click on "Find an enterprise" on the right, enter "EBX Technologies" as the search term, click on "accept terms", and it yields this:

Business number: 2265599250
Name: EBX TECHNOLOGIES
Address: 1731 rang Saint-Alexis Saint-Maurice (Québec) G0X2X0 Canada
Status: Immatriculée (registered)
Date: 2008-12-29
Status of name: En vigueur (active)
Date: 2008-12-29

Clicking on the link (embedded in the business number) gives this additional info:

Nom de famille (family name) CAZES
Prénom (first name) ALEXANDRE

... as well as that he was repairing computers and selling software out of his home when he started AlphaBay. He was due to file the latest declaration with the government on June 15th. Since he won't be doing that, in 2 years anyone who wants to can re-register the name as their business just for laughs (ISTR the fee was $60 if you filed it yourself at the courthouse) - though I personally wouldn't advise it. There's going to be a few people who are mightily pissed off at the guy, and they may think you're somehow related to him.

As the PASSWORD? Huh?

[wonkey_monkey]

[A]ccording to U.S. prosecutors, he used his real email address, albeit a Hotmail address -- Pimp_Alex_91@hotmail.com -- as the administrator password for the marketplace software

Whut?

Article says "contact."

Re:"more arrests as AlphaBay users are tracked dow

[Kjella]

I am trying to write the sarcasm ending tag (meant to be within the parenthesis in that previous comment) but it gets always deleted?! Someone here should review the HTML parsing part!

/. doesn't allow direct HTML in comments, been that way 20 years. If you want to do quasi-HTML, learn to write HTML entities. Like </sarcasm> has to be written like &lt;/sarcasm&gt; Oh and the & itself is written &amp; in case you're wondering. Lots of entities won't work though, only a small white-list. Particularly I miss the Greek letters for formulas, though most western characters are there like üöæøåñçß. Forget the rest of Unicode though, not happening...