Chapter 6
RAWMEO
By March 2017, The always aggressive Fresno prosecutor Grant Rabenn is preparing to charge Alexandre Cazes for running AlphaBay. But his more cautious colleague Paul Hemesart wanted more evidence. They’re still busy filing subpoenas for Cazes’ cryptocurrency trading account and all of his online activities, from email to banking, which have begun to coalesce into a portrait of Cazes’ entire digital presence. It wasn’t until April that they discovered a new element of this life, revealing to them the everyday thoughts of Cazes in details they never believed.
Their investigation led them to an online forum called Roosh V. The team quickly learned that the site was a community of hyper-masculine, alpha male, pickup artists, and misogynistic, alt-right racist, and anti-LGBTQ bigots. Founded in 2008 by blogger Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, it has tens of thousands of registered users who coach each other on how to maximize sex and live an “alpha” lifestyle.
The Fresno team found a curious person on that forum. He joined Roosh V in late 2014 under the name “Rawmeo”. The pseudonym appears to be alluding to his love of “rough” or unprotected sex. Rawmeo has written over a thousand posts and has achieved “real gamer” status on the forums. He describes himself living big in Thailand, owning a lot of bitcoin, and owning a web hosting and design company — all of which match Cazes’ public profile. When the team of prosecutors subpoenaed Cazes’ PayPal account, they confirmed it: Cazes, the baby-faced programmer, was using his account to pay for Roosh V’s premium subscription. The alpha male Rawmeo is another of his many personalities.
In some ways, Rawmeo is the exact opposite of Alpha02. A darknet kingpin, Alpha02 is all about business: He keeps his communication with the AlphaBay community to a minimum, posting only occasional colorless statements about the site’s functionality. Rawmeo, by contrast, is a full-color, well-rounded character, an outlet for Cazes to enjoy the rewards of his extraordinary success, stretch his ego, and speak lyrically about his personal philosophy. As he puts it: “The one who fucks the least always wins.”
It turns out that Cazes was a prolific poster for a Roosh V-specific section, dubbed the “I-Just-Had-Sex” thread, where he described how he often picked up Thai women – leaving them in his Lamborghini or Porsche Impress – and try to sleep with them in as few situations as possible. He describes the women as “his harem” or “plates,” referring to the common Roosh V analogy of a juggler spinning the plates as much as possible, never giving anyone too much attention to be distracted and letting one fall .
Each Rawmeo post ends with his lengthy signature summarizing his way of life and extolling the contradictory virtues of promiscuity in men and virginity in women: “Live in Thailand, enjoy life, make money, have no interest in Western women, don’t care a thousand A problem for the millennials, addicted to rough. #NoHymenNoDiamond #PoppedCherryDontMarry #RealMenDontDateSingleMoms.”
Like many self-styled pickup artists, Cazes believes in a strict “sex market value,” or SMV, system that can be calculated to determine a man’s sexuality. “The four pillars of SMV are fame, looks, money, and games,” he wrote. “I would say fame comes first.”
