AlphaBay was the largest online drug bazaar in history, run by a technological mastermind who seemed untouchable—until his tech was turned against him.
Shortly before AlphaBay took over the dark web's top spot, Alpha02 had changed his username on the site to merely “admin” and announced that he would no longer accept any private messages sent to him by anyone other than AlphaBay's staff. Instead, he left much of the site's communications work to his second-in-command and head of security, a figure who went by the pseudonym DeSnake.
That fortune was, by the time of Alpha02's name change, growing at an unprecedented rate: By October 2015, AlphaBay had more than 200,000 users and more than 21,000 product listings for drugs, compared to just 12,000 listings on Silk Road at its peak. Sometime around the middle of 2016, AlphaBay surpassed Agora's peak sales rate of $350,000 a day, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon.
“Is this person just a pure genius who's figured out all of the possible mistakes?” Rabenn remembers asking himself. “Has this individual found the perfect country with the right IT infrastructure to run a marketplace, and he's able to bribe the officials there so we'll never touch him?