Cloned Boy
Professional
- Messages
- 1,164
- Reaction score
- 884
- Points
- 113
History of Lawlessness.
Today you will learn the story of a man who was called the king of the Darknet. And his name is Paul Le Roux.
Today is another topic from the series "History of Lawlessness". But if you read this topic only halfway, you will not understand where the lawlessness is. It may seem that I am telling a story about the formation of another genius from the world of high technology. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Suckerberg. Judge for yourself, a successful young programmer created unique software in the 2000s, made his own startup.
It would seem that the guy was on his way to success, but at some point he decided that he could earn much faster on the other side of the law. And literally in a few years he turned into an international criminal, with a chain of corpses behind him. In general, studying his biography, I could not shake the feeling that he was trying to recreate the life of some movie villain. He hired gangs of mercenaries, planned a coup d'etat, did business with Colombian drug cartels, sold secret technologies to Iran and kept his savings in gold bars.
Today you will learn the story of a man who was nicknamed the King of the Darknet and his name is Paul Le Roux. The life of every person is a series of accidents and controversial choices.
Who among us has not had to regret something done in the past? But it seems to me that it is better this way than to bite your elbows for years because you once did not dare or were afraid to do something important. To confess your love, to move to another city, to change your lifestyle. I know a lot of people who earn pennies and hate their jobs. Many are afraid to quit everything and do something else, because who needs me? I will not succeed. But here there is stability. I was in an absolutely identical situation.
So, believe me, you have not even tried, and already gave up. But there is another option to take a risk, as I did. Geekbrains is holding a free overview intensive course on professions related to artificial intelligence. In two hours, you will learn about three in-demand specialties. Data scientist, data engineer and analytic data. You will understand what values and Skills each of them requires, what business tasks they solve and how much they earn.
And then decide for yourself in which direction you want to develop. Let me remind you that participation is free. By the way, in December, Geekbrain offers a 50% discount on all courses. So choose what suits you best. Sign up using the link in the description. And don't be afraid to change your life for the better. Today, our story is unique.
For the first time, I will tell you about a person who is still alive. And all the main events took place just recently, at the beginning of the 21st century. Now Paul Le Roux is serving a 20-year sentence in an American prison. This is twice as long as his criminal career lasted. And he got off easy. Le Roux was facing life in prison. But he fully cooperated with the investigation. And he himself handed over his entire underground empire to the police.
This empire was discovered by accident. Until 2007, the American Drug Enforcement Administration didn’t even know that a huge organization was operating under its nose. And they knew nothing about a man named Paul Le Roux. It all started with a small test purchase in a respected online pharmacy. No one could have imagined what it would lead to. A routine investigation uncovered an international arms and drug trafficking network involving more than a thousand people.
They hunted for it for five years across the globe, from America to Africa and Hong Kong, until finally its leader, the king of the Darknet, was lured out of hiding and captured where he could not have expected. Well, let’s take things in order. The nameless baby was born in 1972, in Zimbabwe. And he was white. There was nothing surprising about that back then. At the time of the boy's birth, this African country had a different name, Rhodesia, and it was a former English colony, where at that time the white minority was in power.
So, in principle, there were quite a few white people living there. It was not for nothing that I said that the boy had no name, his mother abandoned him in the maternity hospital, but he was lucky, two months later they found him an adoptive family in a small mining town. So our hero received the name Paul Le Roux. By the way, his parents will never admit that he is adopted.
Le Roux finds out about this by accident many years later, just before starting a criminal business. Perhaps this fact played an important role here. Le Roux was lucky with his adoptive family. His father earned a good income, and his parents loved him. But soon his cloudless childhood came to an end. In 1980, Rhodesia ceased to exist, and Zimbabwe appeared in its place. Robert Mugabe, who was an outspoken black racist, came to power.
So Le Roux's parents, like many other white residents, decided to quickly get out of the country and moved to South Africa. By the way, not in vain. In a few years, Mugabe will declare all whites enemies of the state. And will start taking away property and land. And will plunge the country into a deep economic crisis. Le Roux was lucky in this regard. He grew up quietly in a rich family. His father created a small coal mining company.
So they did not need anything. And soon Le Roux even got his own computer. And this was in the 80s, when computers were considered a rarity. True, for this, the father asked his son to wash his car for several months, but these are trifles. It turned out that Le Roux liked the new toy. In general, he grew up a rather introverted guy, did not make friends with anyone, did not communicate and did not like sports. But virtual reality with the opportunity to feel like the captain of a spaceship was very attractive.
Le Roux's first brush with the police occurred at the age of 15. He was accused of distributing pornography. You could say that was quite something. But remember, this was in South Africa and in the 80s. Sex was a taboo subject. The boy could have faced a real prison sentence, but it helped that his father was a rich businessman. And the matter was hushed up.
You know how. Maybe that incident showed Le Roux that money could solve a problem. By high school, he had come across a group of withdrawn, aggressive teenagers who constantly snapped at teachers and refused to learn Afrikaans, one of the compulsory languages in South Africa. Le Roux claimed that it was a "dead language"; no one spoke it in everyday life, which meant it was not needed. In the end, Le Roux dropped out of school and went on to take programming courses, and, as they say, mastered the profession quite quickly.
In any case, one of his relatives will recall that Le Roux completed a year-long course in just two months and decided to leave South Africa forever. The reason for this decision was a family vacation in the United States. Le Roux saw for the first time how people lived in a First World country and realized that South Africa was a hole. He needed to move somewhere closer to civilization, so immediately after returning, Le Roux told his parents that he was leaving, packed his things and flew off to conquer England.
For several years, he worked as an ordinary programmer, and then met his future wife and moved to Australia. That's basically all the information about his life before the Internet. Le Roux himself said practically nothing about his youth. Journalist Evan Ratliff managed to collect this information bit by bit from the recollections of his cousin and one of Le Roux's former colleagues.
You must admit, so far this hardly resembles the career of a crime boss and one of the main villains of our time. There were no bad companies, no theft, not even banal fights in his life. Le Roux was not one of those who grew up around the criminal world. On the contrary, he consciously came there as an adult because he realized that only there he could earn a decent living, without having to comply with the law, both legal and moral.
It seems that Le Roux was a sociopath in general and treated other people with contempt. This can be judged at least by his activity on the Internet. Every person has a digital trail. There is one because of Le Roux. On the one hand, he was an active participant in various forums for programmers, and on the other - a fat, unprincipled troll. This was in those distant times when the Internet was free from any prohibitions, and therefore was the most toxic place on Earth.
And Le Roux was the embodiment of his time, which meant he was an aggressive asshole. He called Australia a useless country that could sink without anything changing in the world. He wrote racist comments about Jews, he threatened to kill other users, in general, he had a blast. But it’s unclear how sincere Le Roux was in these fights. Many years later, he said that he wrote nasty things purely for fun.
He was amused by how angry Australians were when someone spoke badly of their country. And the more aggressive the response, the more lulz he caught. Other people didn’t mince words either and often threatened to break Le Roux’s bones. But still, under the mask of an online troll, one could see his real views, because of which he entered the world beyond the law without the slightest hesitation.
Firstly, Le Roux wrote more than once that drugs should be legalized. Secondly, he was outraged that the digital age was taking away people’s freedom. Banks and the government could track their every move. In the future, Le Roux would prove in practice that these were not just words for him. In 1998, E4M for hard drives was born. The code that Le Roux wrote alone, from scratch, and which remains a problem for hackers to this day.
At first, he did not try to monetize it or put the program online for free and with open source code. And in addition, he published a manifesto, where he contrasted E4M with a government project to collect data on citizens called Echelon. He wrote, “In the real world, the fight for privacy has long been lost. As more and more human activity moves online, governments fight to preserve their powers.
Strong encryption is a mechanism that will help preserve your rights and guarantee freedom in the information age.” And behind the big words, there really was high-quality software. According to Snowden, the Americans were unable to crack the disks encrypted by Le Roux's program, even 15 years after its creation. But this advanced development did not bring any money to its creator. By that time, Le Roux had a small IT company, but it was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and clearly did not satisfy his growing appetites.
In 1999, Le Roux divorced his wife and moved again, this time to the Netherlands, where he quickly married a second time. There, Le Roux tried to make money again and opened an outsourcing programming firm. One of the company's main services was remote encryption setup on clients' computers.
A year later, one of his clients, Wilfred Hafner, invited him to work for his startup. He planned to make a commercial version of Le Roux's program and offered him the position of chief developer. Hafner later recalled that at that time, Le Roux did not have a penny. He lived in a tiny apartment with his wife and child and drove a battered car. When he came to an interview with Hafner in his luxurious house in the south of France, he was simply amazed by his wealth and, without any modesty, said that he wanted to have everything the same.
But their cooperation did not last long. Already in 2002, Le Roux was fired in disgrace for the fact that in parallel with working for Hafner, he created exactly the same program of his own. After such humiliation, Le Roux decided to never work for his uncle again and stop doing any innovative things. From now on and forever, his main goal will be to make money.
Anywhere and anyhow. At first, Le Roux decided that the easiest way to make money would be an online casino. It would seem that what could be simpler? It’s a surefire option. The casino always wins. To create it, Le Roux even learned a new programming language in record time. But nothing came of this venture. He created the website, but he didn’t think about how to attract players. The project existed for several years in a half-dead state.
It got to the point that Le Roux was again forced to look for work as an ordinary programmer right on Internet forums. At the same time, he finally learned that he was adopted, and this was another event that changed his life. Angry, deceived and humiliated, the introvert decided to never lose again. The first thing he did was complete the project he was working on at Hafner’s company. In 2004, the first version of TrueCrypt was released. The program was free and positioned as the most reliable means of encrypting data.
Le Roux never officially admitted that he was one of the developers, but few doubted that he took an active part in TrueCrypt. Moreover, the program had incredibly good funding, which came from who knows where. And now you will find out where. Around the same time, Le Roux disappeared from Internet forums forever. And all because his secret business had already started working.
A year before, Le Roux posted an ad that he was looking for a person with an American passport. And although the text did not directly indicate this, it was clear that he needed a drop to become a front man for the new company. Then the company "Arix Limited" appeared, which offered its clients hassle-free purchase of prescription drugs. The scheme was simple and elegant. Anyone could go to the site, choose the desired drug and fill out a questionnaire with symptoms.
The questionnaire ended up on the desk of a real doctor, who wrote out a prescription, despite the fact that he had never seen the patient in person. The prescription went to the right pharmacy, and from there the officially prescribed medicine was sent by mail to the client. Naturally, both the doctor and the pharmacies received a hefty percentage for this cooperation. The company's main income came from Viagra, headache medications with barbiturates and opiates, and a drug called Soma, which contained the drug carisoprodol.
The scheme turned out to be so profitable that RX Limited soon had two large call centers in Israel. Le Roux's gimmick was that he managed to find a loophole in the legislation. It said that a doctor should prescribe medications based on symptoms. It did not say that the patient had to be present, so many of the company's participants had the feeling that they were engaged in completely legal activities.
Arix Limited sales representatives showed doctors' licenses in pharmacies to convince them that everything was legal. One particularly suspicious pharmacist even contacted a friend from the Drug Enforcement Administration, who confirmed that there would be no problems. The second feature of the business was advertising. The online pharmacy was advertised using cold calls and mass spam mailings.
And in order to avoid spam filters, Le Roux began opening more and more mirrors of the site with different domains. And then he even created his own domain registrar. In 2012, half of all fraudulent pharmacies in the world were registered through Le Roux. Ariks Limited received tens of thousands of orders every week and $ 5 million in net profit every month. Le Roux had finally found a gold mine, and he did not care how many people would die from such a business.
But naturally, he understood that he was walking on thin ice, and sooner or later the Drug Enforcement Administration would have questions for him. So in 2007, he left the Netherlands and moved his entire family to the Philippines. Doesn't sound like the most obvious option for a luxurious life. But Le Roux settled in one of the most prestigious areas of the capital, in a luxurious house with a swimming pool. Plus, in the Philippines, he felt himself in a much more familiar environment of freedom.
True, freedoms are specific. Here, unlike in Europe, money really decided everything. In general, I think Le Roux would have felt great at the beginning of the 20th century in the era of wild capitalism, where there were no rules in business except the law of the strong. And here on the tropical islands, this law was still preserved. Le Roux himself said that here you could even find a killer for 100 dollars. Finally, he achieved what he wanted - wealth.
But it turned out that money alone was not enough for him. Now Le Roux was hungry for power, not as a public politician, but as the king of his own secret empire. He was overcome by greed, a sense of self-importance and suspicion. He saw himself as a new type of criminal, who relied primarily on his mind and the possibilities of the digital world. He thought that he was exactly the same successful startup entrepreneur who created a company in a garage and then sold it for 100 million dollars.
Only from the world of crime. In literally one year, he turned from a pauper into a millionaire and decided that he could do absolutely anything. But in fact, he went crazy and began to cosplay the lifestyle of a villain from James Bond films. In his office, wads of cash were stacked to the ceiling, and his mini-state already numbered more than a thousand people.
Le Roux even recruited his own army of former soldiers. One day, he learned that two call center managers were planning to open their own pharmacy in the United States to sell his products. What would a normal manager do in this case? He would call him for a frank conversation, try to find out what was going on and somehow resolve the situation. But what did Le Roux do? He lured one of the managers onto a yacht under the pretext of business negotiations and ordered him to be thrown into the sea. They
even started shooting at him before he had time to explain that he had been misunderstood. And in fact, their plan would have been beneficial to Le Roux. It was awkward. In the end, the manager was pulled out of the water and, just in case, threatened with murder if he decided to leave the company. And this was not some isolated outburst of rage. Le Roux assumed by default that everyone around him was trying to screw him over. In 2008, he even ordered his cousin's house to be burned down after an argument over money.
And if he sent his people to negotiations, he would send another group to follow the first ones. And not a single person in Le Roux's company knew all the operations he was behind. Soon he discovered a new area for himself. When he hired soldiers, the question arose of where to buy weapons. To do this, Le Roux hired a former Israeli lobbyist who was engaged in selling Israeli weapons to those to whom the government could not officially sell them.
And this turned out to be one of Le Roux's most valuable personnel acquisitions. He soon realized that he himself could, with his help, sell weapons to those who would be willing to pay more. His regular clients were militias in Somalia. Le Roux was planning to create his own state within a state there, open a cocaine plantation and support the bulk of the mercenaries and acquire heavy weapons.
He wanted either to overthrow the government of the Seychelles or to create a base to fight Somali pirates. But in 2010, he fell out with local commanders and shut down his cocaine republic project. He also had plans to return whites to power in his native Zimbabwe. To do this, he leased a huge amount of agricultural land and began to give it away cheaply to white farmers, who were officially prohibited from owning land.
But things didn’t go further than that either. Le Roux’s greatest achievement in the arms trade was selling missile guidance systems to Iran. And all the money flowed to Hong Kong, where his treasury was kept. I don’t even know what else to call it. Le Roux literally organized warehouses with gold bars, diamonds and silver there, like some medieval count with a guard of former elite soldiers.
And the more his wealth grew, the more bloodthirsty he became, when the only punishment for any offense was death. No man, no problem. And it will be a lesson to others. One of the first to suffer from the boss's changed character was his closest assistant and head of security, Dave Smith. Le Roux suspected him of theft and ordered his kidnapping. Smith was taken out of town, forced to dig his own grave, and shot. It is immediately obvious that Le Roux found his inspiration in movies, not real life.
Instead of the murdered Smith, another person headed the security service - Joseph Hunter. A veteran of the Iraq War with post-traumatic disorder. A former military instructor in the US Army. He will be the one to organize most of the murders for Le Roux. Several years later, at the trial, Le Roux admits that he ordered 7 murders, although in reality the count could be in the dozens. For example, one of his ships transporting weapons was arrested.
The entire crew, including the captain, thought that they were carrying legal cargo from Indonesia to Mali, so they were ready to cooperate with the police. But somehow it happened that soon the ship's captain, his lawyer, and another crew member who was transporting the boxes of weapons to land were all killed. No one was officially charged, and the case remains unsolved to this day.
As I said at the beginning, the investigation against Le Roux began by accident. The police from the drug enforcement department made a test purchase of drugs on one of the Arix Limited websites. And suddenly they themselves uncovered a huge network of drug distribution under counterfeit prescriptions. But for another year they could not understand who was behind this business, until a phone number of a certain Paul Le Roux appeared in one of the documents, which was immediately wiretapped.
And it quickly became clear that Le Roux was involved not only in legal drugs, but also in quite illegal substances. At this point, international forces joined the investigation. And the longer they listened to the phone, the more shocked they were by the scale of this man's activities. The sale of drugs here was the most harmless.
The case involved arms smuggling, Somali mercenaries, murders and methamphetamine from North Korea. Authorities estimated that during the time Arex Limited operated, Le Roux earned more than half a billion dollars. And the most interesting thing is that even knowing his name, they could not immediately understand who this person was. Le Roux began covering his tracks back in 2008, had several fake passports and never used his real name.
In 2011, Le Roux's business suffered a serious blow. The US tightened controls over the drug SOMA, and Arex Limited received a third of its income from the sale of this drug alone. Le Roux was forced to close the call center in Israel and, at a risk to his security, began smuggling drugs from Mexico. Seeing that the noose around his neck was tightening, he moved to Brazil, because Brazil does not have an extradition agreement with America.
For another year, the US did not know how to lure him out of there, but in the end they decided to play on his weaknesses - greed and purity. The idea was suggested to them by one of Le Roux's former mercenaries, who had a grudge against the boss for suspecting him of stealing. Like many others, he said that Le Roux had long dreamed of making a deal with Colombian drug cartels. He could not resist such an offer, but the meeting had to be in Liberia - in Africa.
The country itself did not arouse suspicion. Liberia is considered the capital of African drug trafficking. Plus, the Colombians were also checked up and down. Everything was clean. But when Le Roux finally arrived to meet them in person, it turned out that the drug dealers from Colombia were actually drug enforcement agents from the US. So he was arrested and sent on a plane to America that same day, before he had time to promise the local police huge bribes.
Here one could say something like "this is how the story of the first king of the Darknet ended." But in fact, it was far from the end. One of the main demands that Le Roux made of his subordinates was absolute loyalty. He said, "If you are arrested, then keep your mouth shut. If you keep quiet, then I will thank you.
If you blab, then I will kill you." But as soon as he himself was in the hands of the police, he immediately broke the rules that he set for others. Le Roux himself said that he did not want to spend the rest of his life behind bars, so he was ready to make a deal if he was guaranteed a minimum sentence. After which he gave away absolutely everyone he could. Le Roux pretended to be free for two more years and continued to lead the organization.
He gave orders and planned deals, but only to send his former subordinates straight into the hands of the police. Le Roux's arrest was officially announced only in 2014, when his entire empire was destroyed, including thanks to his efforts. During the trial, Le Roux easily confessed to everything he was accused of - drug trafficking, murder, arming the Samolians, and so on. During the reading of the verdict, the judge literally compared him to a movie villain, but ultimately sentenced him to only 25 years, because a deal is a deal.
Now that's the end. A very strange man, this Paul Le Roux, right? Who wanted a decent life, but ended up losing his way. He was a millionaire for several years, and now he will sit in prison for a quarter of a century, far from his family and without money. By the way, Le Roux is also called a possible candidate for the role of Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary inventor of Bitcoin.
Of course, there can be no direct evidence here. But this information was confirmed by one of Le Roux's former employees. In addition, there is another curious coincidence. Satoshi Nakamoto's latest activities on the Bitcoin network coincide with Le Roux's arrest. Finally, I want to say one more thing. Paul Le Roux began his career as a defender of freedom and privacy. But it turned out that he was primarily concerned not with the Big Brother problem, but with his own desire to hide a crime, which ultimately led to dozens of deaths and an increase in evil on our planet.
So the next time someone sings the praises of anonymity, remember that anonymity is darkness. And darkness allows you not only to resist evil, but also to hide it. Goodbye.
Today you will learn the story of a man who was called the king of the Darknet. And his name is Paul Le Roux.
Today is another topic from the series "History of Lawlessness". But if you read this topic only halfway, you will not understand where the lawlessness is. It may seem that I am telling a story about the formation of another genius from the world of high technology. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Suckerberg. Judge for yourself, a successful young programmer created unique software in the 2000s, made his own startup.
It would seem that the guy was on his way to success, but at some point he decided that he could earn much faster on the other side of the law. And literally in a few years he turned into an international criminal, with a chain of corpses behind him. In general, studying his biography, I could not shake the feeling that he was trying to recreate the life of some movie villain. He hired gangs of mercenaries, planned a coup d'etat, did business with Colombian drug cartels, sold secret technologies to Iran and kept his savings in gold bars.
Today you will learn the story of a man who was nicknamed the King of the Darknet and his name is Paul Le Roux. The life of every person is a series of accidents and controversial choices.
Who among us has not had to regret something done in the past? But it seems to me that it is better this way than to bite your elbows for years because you once did not dare or were afraid to do something important. To confess your love, to move to another city, to change your lifestyle. I know a lot of people who earn pennies and hate their jobs. Many are afraid to quit everything and do something else, because who needs me? I will not succeed. But here there is stability. I was in an absolutely identical situation.
So, believe me, you have not even tried, and already gave up. But there is another option to take a risk, as I did. Geekbrains is holding a free overview intensive course on professions related to artificial intelligence. In two hours, you will learn about three in-demand specialties. Data scientist, data engineer and analytic data. You will understand what values and Skills each of them requires, what business tasks they solve and how much they earn.
And then decide for yourself in which direction you want to develop. Let me remind you that participation is free. By the way, in December, Geekbrain offers a 50% discount on all courses. So choose what suits you best. Sign up using the link in the description. And don't be afraid to change your life for the better. Today, our story is unique.
For the first time, I will tell you about a person who is still alive. And all the main events took place just recently, at the beginning of the 21st century. Now Paul Le Roux is serving a 20-year sentence in an American prison. This is twice as long as his criminal career lasted. And he got off easy. Le Roux was facing life in prison. But he fully cooperated with the investigation. And he himself handed over his entire underground empire to the police.
This empire was discovered by accident. Until 2007, the American Drug Enforcement Administration didn’t even know that a huge organization was operating under its nose. And they knew nothing about a man named Paul Le Roux. It all started with a small test purchase in a respected online pharmacy. No one could have imagined what it would lead to. A routine investigation uncovered an international arms and drug trafficking network involving more than a thousand people.
They hunted for it for five years across the globe, from America to Africa and Hong Kong, until finally its leader, the king of the Darknet, was lured out of hiding and captured where he could not have expected. Well, let’s take things in order. The nameless baby was born in 1972, in Zimbabwe. And he was white. There was nothing surprising about that back then. At the time of the boy's birth, this African country had a different name, Rhodesia, and it was a former English colony, where at that time the white minority was in power.
So, in principle, there were quite a few white people living there. It was not for nothing that I said that the boy had no name, his mother abandoned him in the maternity hospital, but he was lucky, two months later they found him an adoptive family in a small mining town. So our hero received the name Paul Le Roux. By the way, his parents will never admit that he is adopted.
Le Roux finds out about this by accident many years later, just before starting a criminal business. Perhaps this fact played an important role here. Le Roux was lucky with his adoptive family. His father earned a good income, and his parents loved him. But soon his cloudless childhood came to an end. In 1980, Rhodesia ceased to exist, and Zimbabwe appeared in its place. Robert Mugabe, who was an outspoken black racist, came to power.
So Le Roux's parents, like many other white residents, decided to quickly get out of the country and moved to South Africa. By the way, not in vain. In a few years, Mugabe will declare all whites enemies of the state. And will start taking away property and land. And will plunge the country into a deep economic crisis. Le Roux was lucky in this regard. He grew up quietly in a rich family. His father created a small coal mining company.
So they did not need anything. And soon Le Roux even got his own computer. And this was in the 80s, when computers were considered a rarity. True, for this, the father asked his son to wash his car for several months, but these are trifles. It turned out that Le Roux liked the new toy. In general, he grew up a rather introverted guy, did not make friends with anyone, did not communicate and did not like sports. But virtual reality with the opportunity to feel like the captain of a spaceship was very attractive.
Le Roux's first brush with the police occurred at the age of 15. He was accused of distributing pornography. You could say that was quite something. But remember, this was in South Africa and in the 80s. Sex was a taboo subject. The boy could have faced a real prison sentence, but it helped that his father was a rich businessman. And the matter was hushed up.
You know how. Maybe that incident showed Le Roux that money could solve a problem. By high school, he had come across a group of withdrawn, aggressive teenagers who constantly snapped at teachers and refused to learn Afrikaans, one of the compulsory languages in South Africa. Le Roux claimed that it was a "dead language"; no one spoke it in everyday life, which meant it was not needed. In the end, Le Roux dropped out of school and went on to take programming courses, and, as they say, mastered the profession quite quickly.
In any case, one of his relatives will recall that Le Roux completed a year-long course in just two months and decided to leave South Africa forever. The reason for this decision was a family vacation in the United States. Le Roux saw for the first time how people lived in a First World country and realized that South Africa was a hole. He needed to move somewhere closer to civilization, so immediately after returning, Le Roux told his parents that he was leaving, packed his things and flew off to conquer England.
For several years, he worked as an ordinary programmer, and then met his future wife and moved to Australia. That's basically all the information about his life before the Internet. Le Roux himself said practically nothing about his youth. Journalist Evan Ratliff managed to collect this information bit by bit from the recollections of his cousin and one of Le Roux's former colleagues.
You must admit, so far this hardly resembles the career of a crime boss and one of the main villains of our time. There were no bad companies, no theft, not even banal fights in his life. Le Roux was not one of those who grew up around the criminal world. On the contrary, he consciously came there as an adult because he realized that only there he could earn a decent living, without having to comply with the law, both legal and moral.
It seems that Le Roux was a sociopath in general and treated other people with contempt. This can be judged at least by his activity on the Internet. Every person has a digital trail. There is one because of Le Roux. On the one hand, he was an active participant in various forums for programmers, and on the other - a fat, unprincipled troll. This was in those distant times when the Internet was free from any prohibitions, and therefore was the most toxic place on Earth.
And Le Roux was the embodiment of his time, which meant he was an aggressive asshole. He called Australia a useless country that could sink without anything changing in the world. He wrote racist comments about Jews, he threatened to kill other users, in general, he had a blast. But it’s unclear how sincere Le Roux was in these fights. Many years later, he said that he wrote nasty things purely for fun.
He was amused by how angry Australians were when someone spoke badly of their country. And the more aggressive the response, the more lulz he caught. Other people didn’t mince words either and often threatened to break Le Roux’s bones. But still, under the mask of an online troll, one could see his real views, because of which he entered the world beyond the law without the slightest hesitation.
Firstly, Le Roux wrote more than once that drugs should be legalized. Secondly, he was outraged that the digital age was taking away people’s freedom. Banks and the government could track their every move. In the future, Le Roux would prove in practice that these were not just words for him. In 1998, E4M for hard drives was born. The code that Le Roux wrote alone, from scratch, and which remains a problem for hackers to this day.
At first, he did not try to monetize it or put the program online for free and with open source code. And in addition, he published a manifesto, where he contrasted E4M with a government project to collect data on citizens called Echelon. He wrote, “In the real world, the fight for privacy has long been lost. As more and more human activity moves online, governments fight to preserve their powers.
Strong encryption is a mechanism that will help preserve your rights and guarantee freedom in the information age.” And behind the big words, there really was high-quality software. According to Snowden, the Americans were unable to crack the disks encrypted by Le Roux's program, even 15 years after its creation. But this advanced development did not bring any money to its creator. By that time, Le Roux had a small IT company, but it was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and clearly did not satisfy his growing appetites.
In 1999, Le Roux divorced his wife and moved again, this time to the Netherlands, where he quickly married a second time. There, Le Roux tried to make money again and opened an outsourcing programming firm. One of the company's main services was remote encryption setup on clients' computers.
A year later, one of his clients, Wilfred Hafner, invited him to work for his startup. He planned to make a commercial version of Le Roux's program and offered him the position of chief developer. Hafner later recalled that at that time, Le Roux did not have a penny. He lived in a tiny apartment with his wife and child and drove a battered car. When he came to an interview with Hafner in his luxurious house in the south of France, he was simply amazed by his wealth and, without any modesty, said that he wanted to have everything the same.
But their cooperation did not last long. Already in 2002, Le Roux was fired in disgrace for the fact that in parallel with working for Hafner, he created exactly the same program of his own. After such humiliation, Le Roux decided to never work for his uncle again and stop doing any innovative things. From now on and forever, his main goal will be to make money.
Anywhere and anyhow. At first, Le Roux decided that the easiest way to make money would be an online casino. It would seem that what could be simpler? It’s a surefire option. The casino always wins. To create it, Le Roux even learned a new programming language in record time. But nothing came of this venture. He created the website, but he didn’t think about how to attract players. The project existed for several years in a half-dead state.
It got to the point that Le Roux was again forced to look for work as an ordinary programmer right on Internet forums. At the same time, he finally learned that he was adopted, and this was another event that changed his life. Angry, deceived and humiliated, the introvert decided to never lose again. The first thing he did was complete the project he was working on at Hafner’s company. In 2004, the first version of TrueCrypt was released. The program was free and positioned as the most reliable means of encrypting data.
Le Roux never officially admitted that he was one of the developers, but few doubted that he took an active part in TrueCrypt. Moreover, the program had incredibly good funding, which came from who knows where. And now you will find out where. Around the same time, Le Roux disappeared from Internet forums forever. And all because his secret business had already started working.
A year before, Le Roux posted an ad that he was looking for a person with an American passport. And although the text did not directly indicate this, it was clear that he needed a drop to become a front man for the new company. Then the company "Arix Limited" appeared, which offered its clients hassle-free purchase of prescription drugs. The scheme was simple and elegant. Anyone could go to the site, choose the desired drug and fill out a questionnaire with symptoms.
The questionnaire ended up on the desk of a real doctor, who wrote out a prescription, despite the fact that he had never seen the patient in person. The prescription went to the right pharmacy, and from there the officially prescribed medicine was sent by mail to the client. Naturally, both the doctor and the pharmacies received a hefty percentage for this cooperation. The company's main income came from Viagra, headache medications with barbiturates and opiates, and a drug called Soma, which contained the drug carisoprodol.
The scheme turned out to be so profitable that RX Limited soon had two large call centers in Israel. Le Roux's gimmick was that he managed to find a loophole in the legislation. It said that a doctor should prescribe medications based on symptoms. It did not say that the patient had to be present, so many of the company's participants had the feeling that they were engaged in completely legal activities.
Arix Limited sales representatives showed doctors' licenses in pharmacies to convince them that everything was legal. One particularly suspicious pharmacist even contacted a friend from the Drug Enforcement Administration, who confirmed that there would be no problems. The second feature of the business was advertising. The online pharmacy was advertised using cold calls and mass spam mailings.
And in order to avoid spam filters, Le Roux began opening more and more mirrors of the site with different domains. And then he even created his own domain registrar. In 2012, half of all fraudulent pharmacies in the world were registered through Le Roux. Ariks Limited received tens of thousands of orders every week and $ 5 million in net profit every month. Le Roux had finally found a gold mine, and he did not care how many people would die from such a business.
But naturally, he understood that he was walking on thin ice, and sooner or later the Drug Enforcement Administration would have questions for him. So in 2007, he left the Netherlands and moved his entire family to the Philippines. Doesn't sound like the most obvious option for a luxurious life. But Le Roux settled in one of the most prestigious areas of the capital, in a luxurious house with a swimming pool. Plus, in the Philippines, he felt himself in a much more familiar environment of freedom.
True, freedoms are specific. Here, unlike in Europe, money really decided everything. In general, I think Le Roux would have felt great at the beginning of the 20th century in the era of wild capitalism, where there were no rules in business except the law of the strong. And here on the tropical islands, this law was still preserved. Le Roux himself said that here you could even find a killer for 100 dollars. Finally, he achieved what he wanted - wealth.
But it turned out that money alone was not enough for him. Now Le Roux was hungry for power, not as a public politician, but as the king of his own secret empire. He was overcome by greed, a sense of self-importance and suspicion. He saw himself as a new type of criminal, who relied primarily on his mind and the possibilities of the digital world. He thought that he was exactly the same successful startup entrepreneur who created a company in a garage and then sold it for 100 million dollars.
Only from the world of crime. In literally one year, he turned from a pauper into a millionaire and decided that he could do absolutely anything. But in fact, he went crazy and began to cosplay the lifestyle of a villain from James Bond films. In his office, wads of cash were stacked to the ceiling, and his mini-state already numbered more than a thousand people.
Le Roux even recruited his own army of former soldiers. One day, he learned that two call center managers were planning to open their own pharmacy in the United States to sell his products. What would a normal manager do in this case? He would call him for a frank conversation, try to find out what was going on and somehow resolve the situation. But what did Le Roux do? He lured one of the managers onto a yacht under the pretext of business negotiations and ordered him to be thrown into the sea. They
even started shooting at him before he had time to explain that he had been misunderstood. And in fact, their plan would have been beneficial to Le Roux. It was awkward. In the end, the manager was pulled out of the water and, just in case, threatened with murder if he decided to leave the company. And this was not some isolated outburst of rage. Le Roux assumed by default that everyone around him was trying to screw him over. In 2008, he even ordered his cousin's house to be burned down after an argument over money.
And if he sent his people to negotiations, he would send another group to follow the first ones. And not a single person in Le Roux's company knew all the operations he was behind. Soon he discovered a new area for himself. When he hired soldiers, the question arose of where to buy weapons. To do this, Le Roux hired a former Israeli lobbyist who was engaged in selling Israeli weapons to those to whom the government could not officially sell them.
And this turned out to be one of Le Roux's most valuable personnel acquisitions. He soon realized that he himself could, with his help, sell weapons to those who would be willing to pay more. His regular clients were militias in Somalia. Le Roux was planning to create his own state within a state there, open a cocaine plantation and support the bulk of the mercenaries and acquire heavy weapons.
He wanted either to overthrow the government of the Seychelles or to create a base to fight Somali pirates. But in 2010, he fell out with local commanders and shut down his cocaine republic project. He also had plans to return whites to power in his native Zimbabwe. To do this, he leased a huge amount of agricultural land and began to give it away cheaply to white farmers, who were officially prohibited from owning land.
But things didn’t go further than that either. Le Roux’s greatest achievement in the arms trade was selling missile guidance systems to Iran. And all the money flowed to Hong Kong, where his treasury was kept. I don’t even know what else to call it. Le Roux literally organized warehouses with gold bars, diamonds and silver there, like some medieval count with a guard of former elite soldiers.
And the more his wealth grew, the more bloodthirsty he became, when the only punishment for any offense was death. No man, no problem. And it will be a lesson to others. One of the first to suffer from the boss's changed character was his closest assistant and head of security, Dave Smith. Le Roux suspected him of theft and ordered his kidnapping. Smith was taken out of town, forced to dig his own grave, and shot. It is immediately obvious that Le Roux found his inspiration in movies, not real life.
Instead of the murdered Smith, another person headed the security service - Joseph Hunter. A veteran of the Iraq War with post-traumatic disorder. A former military instructor in the US Army. He will be the one to organize most of the murders for Le Roux. Several years later, at the trial, Le Roux admits that he ordered 7 murders, although in reality the count could be in the dozens. For example, one of his ships transporting weapons was arrested.
The entire crew, including the captain, thought that they were carrying legal cargo from Indonesia to Mali, so they were ready to cooperate with the police. But somehow it happened that soon the ship's captain, his lawyer, and another crew member who was transporting the boxes of weapons to land were all killed. No one was officially charged, and the case remains unsolved to this day.
As I said at the beginning, the investigation against Le Roux began by accident. The police from the drug enforcement department made a test purchase of drugs on one of the Arix Limited websites. And suddenly they themselves uncovered a huge network of drug distribution under counterfeit prescriptions. But for another year they could not understand who was behind this business, until a phone number of a certain Paul Le Roux appeared in one of the documents, which was immediately wiretapped.
And it quickly became clear that Le Roux was involved not only in legal drugs, but also in quite illegal substances. At this point, international forces joined the investigation. And the longer they listened to the phone, the more shocked they were by the scale of this man's activities. The sale of drugs here was the most harmless.
The case involved arms smuggling, Somali mercenaries, murders and methamphetamine from North Korea. Authorities estimated that during the time Arex Limited operated, Le Roux earned more than half a billion dollars. And the most interesting thing is that even knowing his name, they could not immediately understand who this person was. Le Roux began covering his tracks back in 2008, had several fake passports and never used his real name.
In 2011, Le Roux's business suffered a serious blow. The US tightened controls over the drug SOMA, and Arex Limited received a third of its income from the sale of this drug alone. Le Roux was forced to close the call center in Israel and, at a risk to his security, began smuggling drugs from Mexico. Seeing that the noose around his neck was tightening, he moved to Brazil, because Brazil does not have an extradition agreement with America.
For another year, the US did not know how to lure him out of there, but in the end they decided to play on his weaknesses - greed and purity. The idea was suggested to them by one of Le Roux's former mercenaries, who had a grudge against the boss for suspecting him of stealing. Like many others, he said that Le Roux had long dreamed of making a deal with Colombian drug cartels. He could not resist such an offer, but the meeting had to be in Liberia - in Africa.
The country itself did not arouse suspicion. Liberia is considered the capital of African drug trafficking. Plus, the Colombians were also checked up and down. Everything was clean. But when Le Roux finally arrived to meet them in person, it turned out that the drug dealers from Colombia were actually drug enforcement agents from the US. So he was arrested and sent on a plane to America that same day, before he had time to promise the local police huge bribes.
Here one could say something like "this is how the story of the first king of the Darknet ended." But in fact, it was far from the end. One of the main demands that Le Roux made of his subordinates was absolute loyalty. He said, "If you are arrested, then keep your mouth shut. If you keep quiet, then I will thank you.
If you blab, then I will kill you." But as soon as he himself was in the hands of the police, he immediately broke the rules that he set for others. Le Roux himself said that he did not want to spend the rest of his life behind bars, so he was ready to make a deal if he was guaranteed a minimum sentence. After which he gave away absolutely everyone he could. Le Roux pretended to be free for two more years and continued to lead the organization.
He gave orders and planned deals, but only to send his former subordinates straight into the hands of the police. Le Roux's arrest was officially announced only in 2014, when his entire empire was destroyed, including thanks to his efforts. During the trial, Le Roux easily confessed to everything he was accused of - drug trafficking, murder, arming the Samolians, and so on. During the reading of the verdict, the judge literally compared him to a movie villain, but ultimately sentenced him to only 25 years, because a deal is a deal.
Now that's the end. A very strange man, this Paul Le Roux, right? Who wanted a decent life, but ended up losing his way. He was a millionaire for several years, and now he will sit in prison for a quarter of a century, far from his family and without money. By the way, Le Roux is also called a possible candidate for the role of Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary inventor of Bitcoin.
Of course, there can be no direct evidence here. But this information was confirmed by one of Le Roux's former employees. In addition, there is another curious coincidence. Satoshi Nakamoto's latest activities on the Bitcoin network coincide with Le Roux's arrest. Finally, I want to say one more thing. Paul Le Roux began his career as a defender of freedom and privacy. But it turned out that he was primarily concerned not with the Big Brother problem, but with his own desire to hide a crime, which ultimately led to dozens of deaths and an increase in evil on our planet.
So the next time someone sings the praises of anonymity, remember that anonymity is darkness. And darkness allows you not only to resist evil, but also to hide it. Goodbye.
