The Hunt for the Kingpin Behind AlphaBay, Half 3: Alpha Male | Tech Zen

CHAPTER 6

RAWMEO

By March 2017, Fresno’s ever aggressive prosecutor, Grant Rabenn, was able to cost Alexandre Cazes with operating AlphaBay. However his colleague Paul Hemesath, extra cautious, needed extra proof. They had been nonetheless busy submitting subpoenas not just for Cazes’ cryptocurrency alternate accounts, however for all of their on-line exercise, from e-mail to banking, which had begun to coalesce right into a portrait of Cazes’s whole digital existence. It was solely in April that they discovered a brand new component of that life, one that exposed Cazes’ every day ideas in a stage of element that they had by no means thought potential.

Their investigation had led them to an internet discussion board referred to as Roosh V. The location, the crew rapidly discovered, was one thing of a hyper-masculine group of alpha males and artists, in addition to a hotbed for misogyny, far-right racism, and anti-Vietnam bigotry. -LGBTQ. Based by blogger Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in 2008, it had tens of hundreds of registered customers, males who educated one another to maximise their sexual conquests and dwell an “alpha” life-style.

The Fresno crew had discovered a curious particular person on that discussion board. He had joined Roosh V in late 2014 and referred to as himself “Rawmeo”. The pseudonym gave the impression to be an allusion to his love of unprotected intercourse. Rawmeo had written over a thousand posts and achieved “True Gamer” standing on the discussion board. He described himself as residing massive in Thailand, proudly owning a Bitcoin fortune and proudly owning a hosting and design firm, all attributes that matched Cazes’s public persona. When the prosecution crew subpoenaed Cazes’s PayPal account, they confirmed it: Cazes, the baby-faced programmer, was utilizing his account to pay for a premium subscription to Roosh V. Rawmeo, the alpha male, was one other of his many personalities.

In some methods Rawmeo was the other of Alpha02. As kingpin of the darkish internet, Alpha02 was all enterprise: he had restricted his communications with the AlphaBay group to the naked minimal, issuing solely occasional colorless statements in regards to the web site’s options. Rawmeo, in contrast, was a revealing character in full shade, an outlet for Cazes to bask within the rewards of his larger-than-life success, stretch his ego, and get lyrical about his private philosophy. As he himself stated, “The one that cares least about fucking will all the time have the higher hand.”

It turned out that Cazes was a prolific poster boy for a selected part of Roosh V often known as the “I simply had intercourse” thread, the place he described how he used to select up Thai girls, impressing them together with his Lamborghini or Porsche. and attempt to sleep with them with as few ties as potential. He described the ladies as “his harem” or “plates”, a reference to Roosh V’s widespread analogy of a juggler who spins as many plates as potential, by no means paying sufficient consideration to them as to be distracted and let one fall.

Every Rawmeo submit ended together with his prolonged byline, summarizing his life-style and extolling the paradoxical virtues of promiscuity for males and virginity for ladies: “Dwelling in Thailand, having fun with life, incomes cash, not concerned with Western girls, I do not give a shit. millennial issues, hooked on rawdogging. #NoHymenNoDiamond #PoppedCherryDontMarry #RealMenDontDateSingleMoms.”

Cazes, like many self-styled seducers, believed in a strict system of “sexual market worth” or SMV, which could possibly be calculated to find out a person’s sexual fortune. “The 4 pillars of SMV are Fame, Look, Cash, Playing,” he wrote. “I might say that fame is no 1.”