Alexandre Cazes, the admin of AlphaBay is said to have taken his own life. AlphaBay is a darknet market that went offline.
According to The Merkle, Alexandre Cazes who committed suicide in his Bangkok prison cell.
Alexandre Cazes was arrested in Thailand on July 5th, which coincides with the day the popular darknet marketplace suddenly disappeared. Without prior notice or official explanation, users were unable to place orders or access their funds. So far, this situation has not been resolved, which only makes it more plausible to assume the AlphaBay administrator has indeed been arrested. Or as the stories claim, he has apparently committed suicide.
According to Thai sources, Cazes took his own life on July 12th around 7 AM, while he was still detained in a cell of the Narcotics Bureau of Bangkok. On that day, Cazes was supposed to meet up with a lawyer to prepare for his extradition back to the United States. Standing trial in the US under allegations of arms trading, narcotics trading, and operating an illegal marketplace is never a fun experience. In fact, Ross Ulbricht got sentenced to life in prison without parole for a similar project known as Silk Road.
If Cazes is indeed the AlphaBay administrator, this news doesn’t bode well for the marketplace and all of the money still locked inside its wallets. It is unclear if anyone else has access to the necessary resources so that the platform can be relaunched in the future. It is also unclear as to what Cazes may have told the authorities in regards to AlphaBay, its users, or other people working on the platform.
On Reddit, there is some wild speculation as to whether or not these claims are true. It is hard to determine if Cazes is the real AlphaBay admin, but all of the information seems to hint at that outcome. His arrest coincides with the platform going down, and it would also explain why AlphaBay has not resurfaced. On the platform, the admin is known as “deSnakes”, which very well could indeed by Cazes. At the time of his arrest, authorities also seized his Lamborghini.
We did a further research into the AlphaBay and the Dark web, the following detailed information will give you further knowledge about the concept. The article was written by AlphaBayMarket.com, a proxy website that provides information on AlphaBay, PageOne.ng does not approve not oppose the content.
PS. All external links except for Tor Project have been removed.
Read Below:
AlphaBay is a darknet site and you can only access the AlphaBay URL via the Tor network. It offers all sorts of listings, but mostly illicit drugs, firearms, stolen personal information, etc. The payment is regulated by bitcoins.
AlphaBay Market transactions are processed through a centralized Escrow system to protect buyers at all times.
When a transaction is started, the funds are temporarily held in the Escrow system until the buyer marks that he has received the goods.
Certainly, when you’re selling this particular kind of goods and services, you will do your best to stay anonymous, both as a seller and as a buyer; and in order to access the AlphaBay URL there are some steps you need to take beforehand.
How to access the AlphaBay URL?
Next, you are going to need the complete step by step guide (just updated) to help you navigate to AlphaBay, sign up, browse, message, and it also contains the AlphaBay URL.
This is the best guide online and will make sure you don’t lose your bitcoins or expose your identity.
There are a few precautions that you should take while on the dark web to maximize your anonymity and not get busted.
Just recently there was a vulnerability in the AlphaBay website code so anyone could read private messages!
You need to protect yourself for when (not if) things like this happen.
If you want to just get to Alphabay without going through the in-depth guide then just follow these quick steps:
- Close all programs accessing the internet on you computer (eg. Dropbox, skype etc.)
- Turn on your VPN. A VPN is a software app that hackers use to stay hidden online. By using a VPN the authorities and even your ISP (Internet Service Provider) won’t even know you are using Tor to access the Dark Web. You see Tor has a specific digital signature that government agencies can see and then log and try to track you. The VPN will make your Tor usage invisible to anyone watching. If you don’t want anyone knowing what you are doing on AlphaBay then I HIGHLY recommend you get a VPN, and make sure it is one that doesn’t keep any logs.
- Connect your VPN to a city or country that is not where you live.
- Start Tor Browser
- Either come back to this page to click the AlphaBay URL or copy and paste the AlphaBay into your Tor browser.
- Register an account and then enter AlphaBay. (Full guide here)
- Enjoy.
Back to it…
For all of those of you that didn’t read the how to guide and just copied and pasted the AlphaBay URL into your normal browser, you may have a slight problem.
You can’t open it?
Hmm… let’s see what’s wrong here.
First of all, you can’t access the AlphaBay URL from your usual browser. Since the AlphaBay URL is located on the darknet and involved in various illegal activities, naturally they want to protect the anonymity of themselves and their users.
So we can access the AlphaBay URL by using Tor browser. Tor network provides that anonymity and privacy to users, whether you use it for legal or illegal purposes.
Next, if you look at the AlphaBay URL above, you’ll notice that it contains a 16 alpha-numeric characters, followed by a .onion domain. These 16 characters can include all letters of the alphabet and decimal digits from 2 to 7. Now, .
Now, .onion is a special-use top level domain suffix designating an anonymous hidden service that can be accessed only via the Tor network.
The address doesn’t actually represent their actual DNS names. .onion TLD does not belong to the Internet DNS root; but by using Tor browser it can be accessed.
.onion websites are basically the same as any other site; the main difference is that they can only be accessed through the hidden network. If you try to search them using regular browsers they would appear as non-existent.
What is TOR network?
The principal of Tor network is simple, yet unbreakable. Tor browser is a modified Firefox browser that uses a private network made possible by volunteers who made their computers available to host one of the Tor nodes.
It uses mathematical encryption to create a messy code of the information traveling from sender to recipient; plus, to complicate things a bit more, the journey involves several routers making a chain while each of the routers encrypts one layer of the message.
The Tor browser can be downloaded from their official page https://www.torproject.org/. Simply extract the bundle on your hard drive and you are ready to go!
But, even if you use Tor properly, there still are ways in which you can be tracked if it is the only tool you use to be safe on the dark web. Do you really want to try your luck?
Apparently, Tor has some issues with the so-called exit nodes, the last router in the chain, which is communicating directly with the receiver – the message sent from the exit node to the receiver doesn’t get encrypted and even though it’s linking back to the middle node, someone who has access to all nodes in the chain can track you down.
So, what can you do?
The best idea would be to pair up Tor with a good VPN that keeps no logs.
How can VPN help in keeping you anonymous?
To explain what this means exactly, I will have to explain you the basic principles of Tor network and regular network.
• Firstly, when using the regular network, you directly connect to a certain website. The website you are connected to can read your IP address, as well as anyone else intercepting that connection. It can be government, hacker, your internet provider; anyone, really.
• TOR stands for The Onion Router, which means that you connect to a series of routers before you connect to a website or a person you are chatting to. Specifically, it looks like this: you connect to the first router – the entry node; the entry node connects to the second router – the middle node; the middle node connects to the third router – the exit node, and the exit node connects to your target website.
It all seems like some sort of a tunnel. With each node, the previously encrypted information is decrypted once, all the way to the exit node where it finally takes its original “shape”. The exit node sends its IP address instead of yours and it doesn’t even know your IP; because, each node knows only the next and the previous IP address in the chain.
However, if someone has the access to all nodes, your IP address can be tracked down, given that the first node has that piece of information.
• VPN, on the other hand, masks your IP address and encrypts your internet usage even further so your ISP and law enforcement cannot even tell you are using Tor to access the deep web in the first place. When you connect to a website through a VPN server, it will continue to use the IP address of the server, instead of yours. Some VPN’s don’t log your movements on the internet, which is even better! NOW, even if someone has all the necessary info to track you down, they would only be able to reach the VPN’s IP address and from here it would be very hard to find you, especially if your VPN doesn’t keep logs of your activities (some of them actually do offer that service).
