Years ago, I came across the story of Alexandre Cazes and I can’t stop thinking about how wild it all was. This 25-year-old Canadian managed to build what became the largest black market on the internet before being brought down in 2017. He was literally running a criminal empire from Thailand.

What’s interesting is how everything worked. AlphaBay wasn’t just a place to sell drugs, although that was part of it. Alexandre Cazes had created a complete illegal e-commerce platform: fake documents, malware, stolen identities, weapons, money laundering. Everything. More than 40,000 sellers and 200,000 users operating on the platform. The transaction volume was in the millions of dollars per day.

And what’s most surprising is that Cazes lived openly in Bangkok. Luxury cars, mansions, cryptocurrencies worth millions. His family didn’t even know what he was really involved in. He made hundreds of millions of dollars a year in commissions, but nobody connected him to anything.

The downfall was almost comical in retrospect. Investigators had been unable to track Alexandre Cazes for months. The platform used Tor, multiple servers around the world, cryptocurrencies for payments. It was practically impossible. But then someone made an initial mistake: in the first days of AlphaBay, they sent welcome emails with his real email address. After that, he fixed it, but an anonymous whistleblower saved the email and passed it on to the authorities.

That was enough. Investigators located his social networks, found old photos, and piece by piece they assembled the puzzle until they reached Bangkok. Working with the Thai police, they pinpointed him at his mansions, observed his routine, and finally arrested him.

Now, here’s the darkest part: Alexandre Cazes died in prison in Bangkok before being extradited to the United States. Reports say it was suicide. The police confiscated assets worth hundreds of millions, including cryptocurrencies, sports cars, and properties.

But what really intrigues me is that after his fall, other markets simply emerged. The game between the police and the operators of black markets never stops. Cazes was a generation of the “king of the dark web,” but how many more came after him? The truth is, we’ll never fully know.