The disappearance of darknet marketplace AlphaBay was first thought to be an exit scam, then was linked to the alleged suicide of one of its owners before credit was claimed by the Department of Justice. Whatever the reason for its demise, it turns out AlphaBay is also an object lesson in how not to run an illegal marketplace.

Adding to the list of things you can’t make up, it turns out that AlphaBay’s demise was thanks to co-founder Alexandere Cazes not only using a Hotmail account to run the site, but the same Hotmail address included his personal details and was the email address used to send a welcome message to every person who signed up for an account on the site.

“Law enforcement subsequently learned the ‘Pimp_Alex_9l@hotmail.com’ email address belonged to a Canadian man named Alexandre Cazes with a birthdate of October 19, 1991, matching the numeric identifier in his Hotmail email address,” the DoJ said in its legal filing. It gets even better: Cazes also used the email address for his admin account on the software running AlphaBay.

If that wasn’t evidence enough, according to The Register, when Thai police raided his house in Bangkok, “they found him still logged into the AlphaBay website as the admin and actively communicating about problems with one of its data centers.”

Although it’s easy to laugh at Cazes’ ineptitude, the takedown of AlphaBay in generally regarded as a positive by experts.

“The recent takedowns of the largest Dark Web criminal markets is certainly great news for cybersecurity – and for security in general – and represents a serious blow for the criminals, whose operations were massively impacted and disrupted,” Cylance Inc. Senior Threat Researcher Marta Janus told SiliconANGLE. “The AlphaBay market was known to offer a wide range of malicious software, including Philadelphia Ransomware, CTBlocker, Stampado and Blackmail Bitcoin Ransomware (among many others).”

Janus said that with the market offline, it’s likely that ransomware attacks will at least slow in coming weeks. She added, however, that alternative marketplaces will emerge.

“Could we expect that malware sales or any other illegal activities in the TOR network will now cease to exist? Unfortunately, no,” Janus said. “As history reveals, sooner or later another market will appear and take over as the favorite place to exchange drugs, weapons and harmful code – just like AlphaBay took over the legacy of SilkRoad, that was closed in 2013, and grew to even greater proportions. Where one market closes, many smaller ones are sure to open, diluting the market share and causing further headaches for law enforcement.”

Photo: 24931020@N02/Flickr