That legal claim took weeks to come to fruition. Finally, one evening in the early weeks of January 2017, Ali was in the middle of a law school evening class when she received a call from a Sacramento-based FBI agent with the message: Subpoena results The court appearance was successful.
The agent told her the name on the exchange account associated with the Tunafish address. That’s Alexandre Cazes.
Next several months, Ali and Erin continued to track more high-value addresses from the AlphaBay cluster into one crypto exchange to another. They recognized what appeared to be Cazes’ identity, even in his bitcoin-laundering habits; In some cases, his attempts to conceal his ownership of bitcoin have become a kind of fingerprint.
In total, the two analysts traced Cazes’ commissions to dozens of crypto exchanges. Prosecutors then subpoenaed them one by one, finding accounts registered in the names of both Cazes’ and his wife. And when those results were achieved, a multi-year pattern emerged: Cazes would open an account with an exchange and attempt to use it to cash out a portion of AlphaBay’s profits. At some point – usually within a few months of his withdrawal – the exchange will get suspicious of the origin of these massive crypto transactions and ask him for more information. information about your customers.
Cazes will send a note explaining that he is just an early investor in Bitcoin. In some cases, the founder of AlphaBay claimed to have purchased thousands of coins from the defunct exchange Mt. Gox in 2011 or 2012 – knowing it would be difficult to check records, as Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014. Meanwhile, Cazes claims to have purchased them from a private seller at a per dollar exchange rate. “Since then, I have juggled quite a bit of money like stocks, buying and selling, but never cashed out,” he wrote in an emailed explanation to an exchange.
However, in 2017, legitimate Bitcoin businesses learned to be wary of these hard-to-verify stories. In most cases, they closed or froze Cazes’ account, forcing him to switch to another exchange. Ali and Erin, meanwhile, can see the true source of Cazes’ wealth being found behind the chain of blockchains.
For years to come, investigators involved in the AlphaBay case will debate whether their crypto tracing alone would solve the case even if they never received the Pimp_alex_91 tip. Will the appearance of Cazes’ name on those exchange accounts be enough to put them in his tracks, or will they see it as just another vague prospect they’re too busy pursuing? ?
However, as it happened, shortly after the advice was sent to Miller about Alpha02, the blockchain work of two FBI analysts nailed a theory in the wall that would otherwise have been hanged by a few owners. subject. Each exchange subpoena and its outcome drew another line between Cazes and AlphaBay’s assets.
“When we saw millions of dollars in crypto flowing to him from what appeared to be an AlphaBay-related wallet, I was pretty confident we had the right people,” Rabenn said. “When you get to that point, you start preparing to commit the crime.”
Continue next week: When investigators found Cazes’ online self on a pickup artist forum, they also discovered a new challenge to capture him red-handed — and plot the most ambitious crook in the history of the dark web.
This story is taken from an upcoming book Traces in the Dark: The Global Hunt for Crypto’s Crime Lords, available November 15, 2022, from Doubleday.
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Chapter illustration: Reymundo Perez III
Image source: Getty Images
This article appeared in the November 2022 issue. Follow now.
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