FBI shares video of Alphabay's admins arrest.

Article

Video

Interesting Thai newscast showcasing Cazes' property.

Relevant post

Bastards were laughing at him, knowing full well he would be dead in 8 days. Fuck the police.


Comments


[1 Points] ThePoluninSnowCircus:

Somebody post video here fuck Vice!

FBI Shows Arrest Video Of Dark Web Kingpin Who Died By Suicide in Police Custody At a cybersecurity conference, the FBI aired a video showing the arrest of AlphaBay’s Alexandre Cazes.

SHARE

TWEET Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Jan 10 2018, 10:53am

In July 2017, the FBI shut down AlphaBay, one of the largest illegal dark web marketplaces in the world, and arrested its administrator, Alexandre Cazes. He died while in custody of Thai police days later by suspected suicide.

At a cybersecurity conference in Manhattan Tuesday, an FBI agent involved in the case showed a video of Cazes’s arrest to journalists and law enforcement, and joked about how the arrest went down.

“See if you can spot the moment when he realizes he's about to be arrested," FBI special agent Nicholas Phirippidis said as he played a few seconds of the surveillance footage of the arrest at Fordham University’s International Conference on Cyber Security; the audience laughed as the video played.

Cazes died eight days after the arrest. He was 26, and never got a trial.

Phirippidis told the audience that the bureau managed to corner Cazes and arrest him while he was still logged in as the admin of AlphaBay by ramming a car through the front gate of his home in Thailand.

This footage has yet to be publicly released and the FBI declined to send us the actual video file, but as I realized what the video was, I filmed some of it on my phone. You can see a brief segment of the video and Phirippidis’s comments below. The FBI declined to send us any of the materials used in the briefing and would not make an agent available for an interview.

On the right, you can see Cazes’ house, and in the middle, Thai agents capture him after luring him out.

It is not unusual for the FBI to give talks at security conferences about closed investigations, but in this case, the FBI is promoting the arrest of a man who wasn't given a trial because he died while in the custody of law enforcement.

The FBI's plan was to crash the undercover police car onto Cazes’ front gate and get him to come out. This wasn’t just to get their hands on him, but also to get his computer before he managed to encrypt his data, something FBI directors have been warning against for years.

The idea was to get Cazes’ computer unlocked and unencrypted to avoid having to potentially crack into it by breaking its encryption, Phirippidis said. Increasingly, police and federal agents try to seize computers while they are on and unlocked to avoid the Apple vs, FBI scenario, where feds initially couldn’t access data on an encrypted iPhone.

Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzo@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzo@motherboard.tv

After crashing the car at the front gate, the agents played dumb, acting like they screwed up a three-point turn. After a minute that “seemed like an eternity,” Phirippidis said, Cazes came downstairs, where the police took his phone and arrested him.

“When we get to his bedroom we see that he’s actually logged in as admin on AlphaBay, which you're not going to get much better evidence than that," Phirippidis said, showing a screenshot of Cazes’s laptop. “We got lucky."

The arrest was the dramatic end to an investigation that started two years earlier thanks to a Hotmail account that linked Cazes to his online, criminal persona on AlphaBay. With that first piece of evidence, Phirippidis and his colleagues at the bureau then “followed the money,” or in this case, his Bitcoin transactions, payments, and cashouts—something that can be done in part with open source tools.

Phirippides closed his talk on another light-hearted note, explaining that the operation to get Cazes was called “Bayonet,” because they wanted to make a “triple-pun” using the word bay, the word net for internet, and for catching “bad guys.”

“It sounded like something,” he said. “We Googled it and there wasn't one already, so we were 'alright!'”


[60 Points] Thx002:

:( With AB died a golden age of darknetmarkets

Funny how some used to shit on them daily then turns out AB was the very best we had

And now we get a video of FBI scumbags laughing


[29 Points] TrojanRabit:

Is Alexander the guy in a white shirt in the video? Poor bastard. I really admire him. The guy was brilliant and had balls. RIP


[22 Points] THE6THSENSE:

FBI shares 10 second video of them laughing...seriously, this is no better than a picture


[7 Points] STFUMandy:

Omg did you see that?? That FBI agent was TOTALLY trying to hump his leg...


[5 Points] None:

The short video is here: https://youtu.be/HXrXD1M6kXk


[6 Points] ReliableDNMsPlz-jpg:

There literally isn't any words to describe this other than disgusting. This is the kind of shit that creates enemies and fuels the DarkNetMarkets to keep pushing against this tyranny. Cazes may have fucked up in the past from carelessness, but he sure as hell gained my respect for creating such a wonderful haven. Sadly, death was his best choice and he lived like a king before it. RIP.


[5 Points] twistersisters:

Fuck Vice tabloid ambulance chasing scum.


[5 Points] stonedbuyer01:

they're some bad hombres


[4 Points] DNMBootyPirate:

Can somebody tell me where all the drugs, that these queers are standing in front of with their little asian dicks out, came from?


[5 Points] goldenfishx:

Phirippidis and his colleagues at the bureau then “followed the money,” or in this case, his Bitcoin transactions, payments, and cashouts

Use Monero, people!


[2 Points] None:

Imagine the feeling of cazez when he hears "FBI" he must've of knew everything was done from there.


[2 Points] None:

[removed]


[2 Points] A0Hell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaiowda-80o


[2 Points] fuckmepelican:

When my doorbell rings I grab my usbs and my nuts and get ready. Rip cazes alpha bay was the best of its kind and none of us realized until it was gone.


[1 Points] None:

ALL COPS ARE FUCKING SCUM AND SHOULD BE DEALT WITH LIKE SCUM! FUCK YOU PIGS!


[1 Points] A0Hell:

https://ekstrabladet.dk/112/skaberen-af-nettets-stoerste-kriminelle-markedsplads-begaar-selvmord-i-cellen/6751612


[1 Points] urbananimall:

That video makes me fucking sick


[1 Points] KnightMirror:

"On Jan. 9, FBI Special Agent Nicholas G. Phirippidis told attendees at the ICCS 2018 how “Operation Bayonet,” as it was dubbed, came together.

The bureau’s first break in identifying Cazes came when an agent in Fresno made two arrests of vendors who’d been selling on AlphaBay. Those arrests prompted someone to leak to the agent an e-mail that Cazes had sent to an early user of AlphaBay, and that e-mail revealed both an ISP address and Cazes’ personal Hotmail account.

Phirippidis said that as they began to track down his digital footprint on social media sites around the internet, it appeared Cazes had cleaned up other parts of his name online.

“For the most part, he had a lot of success, but the internet archive and a few other sites that take snapshots through time allowed us to go back and see some of the early uses of the e-mail address affiliated with his name,” he said.

“Like many of these subjects on the dark web, they try to have a firm firewall [to protect their public persona], and every once in a while, they’ll make the smallest mistake. That’s usually how we can attribute a true name to a moniker on the dark web.”

Another feature of AlphaBay that the FBI explored was the site’s so-called “bitcoin mixer,” which was billed as a foolproof way to launder cryptocurrency but which FBI analysts could figure out. They were able to trace the exchangers who Cazes had been using to convert bitcoins into real-world currency.

A Bizarre Coincidence, a Staged Accident Phirippidis said the bust, which took place from July 2 to 6 in five countries, was as dramatic as a Hollywood thriller. Coincidentally, three days before the scheduled arrest, he and his team were sitting at the bar in the lobby of their Bangkok hotel when a Porsche Panamera E-Hybrid pulled up in front.

“As a joke, one of the prosecutors said ‘Hey look at that car, that looks like one of Cazes’ cars. I’m sure there are more than one of them in Bangkok,’” he said.

“Then we passed Cazes, who was entering through the sliding door in the lobby. It was the most bizarre coincidence I’ve ever been a part of.”

On the day of the arrest three days later, they lured Cazes out of his apartment abruptly by purposely crashing a car into the gate outside his villa. As luck would have it, when they entered the apartment, they found his computer on and already logged onto AlphaBay through his e-mail account.

A week before the FBI took over AlphaBay, European authorities had quietly taken control of Hansa, a similar site to which those fleeing AlphaBay joined on to. They operated it for two weeks to collect information of thousands of users, and then made more arrests.

“The whole point was to throw a curve ball at the dark web community, so they never really know moving forward who they could trust,” Phirippidis said.

“Looking ahead, we want to make sure we can leverage any kind of tactic to hit this thing with a hammer.”


[1 Points] Kid_Crown:

This really makes my blood boil. He was so young. Someone should start a fund for his girl and family


[1 Points] stonedbuyer01:

his death was a illumanti hit.


[1 Points] revoluciones7:

They killed him


[1 Points] hellfinger:

go burn in hell fucking Feds

DPR spirit never dies ! YOU will die one day ! spit on u


[1 Points] ivyleagueillegal:

Why Thailand of all places though? Why not go to a country that doesn't extradite and live a lavish life there? Thai pussy cannot be that great.


[-1 Points] wombat2combat:

op can you please replace your article link with this one https://web.archive.org/web/20180110180157/https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59wwxx/fbi-airs-alexandre-cazes-alphabay-arrest-video thanks


[-5 Points] positive-change:

Bastards were laughing at him, knowing full well he would be dead in 8 days.

Karma is a bitch


[-7 Points] EmpireStateDrugs:

It's funny people actually believe this shit. I think the fake picture of him on the floor was a better presentation. IT WAS AN EXIT SCAM.