A few years ago, something happened that few in the crypto community mention: the fall of AlphaBay. If you don’t know it, it was literally the largest darknet market that ever existed, and its founder was a guy named Alexandre Cazes, a Canadian from Quebec who apparently had everything figured out.

The story is quite intense. Alexandre Cazes built AlphaBay from 2014 and turned it into a money-making machine. We’re talking about more than 40,000 providers, 200,000 active users, and a daily transaction volume that reached millions of dollars. The guy earned commissions from everything: drugs, weapons, fake documents, malware, money laundering services. Practically anything illegal you can imagine was on that platform.

Meanwhile, Alexandre Cazes lived in Bangkok like a magnate. Luxurious mansions, luxury sports cars, millions in cryptocurrencies. But here’s the interesting part: no one around him suspected a thing. He passed as a normal tech entrepreneur, when in reality he was running the largest criminal empire on the internet.

The technology behind AlphaBay was sophisticated. Multiple layers of servers distributed globally, encrypted communications, Bitcoin transactions. Authorities were looking for him but couldn’t find anything for years. Anonymity was practically impenetrable.

But well, everything has a weak point. In the early days of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes made a mistake: every new user received a welcome email that exposed his real email address. He fixed it quickly, but someone had already saved that email and handed it to the authorities. With that in hand, the investigators traced his networks, found old photos, activity records. Step by step, the network was shut down.

Then came the operation. July 2017, Bangkok. Thai agents, the FBI, and other international agencies set up an elaborate trap. While Alexandre Cazes was working in his villa, a car crashed into the door and an undercover agent came out pretending it was an accident. When he went down to check, he was surrounded by dozens of agents. He tried to resist but was subdued in seconds.

The worst part for Alexandre Cazes: he left his computer unencrypted in plain sight. Investigators found everything: cryptocurrency accounts, critical passwords, darknet server addresses. The empire fell apart in a single night.

Now, this is where the story gets strange. While he was in Thai prison waiting for extradition to the United States, Alexandre Cazes was found dead. Authorities reported suicide. He never made it to trial in the U.S.

The police seized assets worth hundreds of millions in cryptocurrencies, cars, and properties. But what’s interesting is that with his downfall, other markets emerged almost immediately. The cat-and-mouse game continues on the darknet. Alexandre Cazes was a generation of the “darknet king,” but the question is obvious: how many others are operating right now without anyone noticing?