South Africa. Its motto was “Excellence in Offshore Program- ming”; its website claimed six employees, although it seemed more like a fig leaf for Le Roux's solo contracting efforts. “I worked with him about six months,” said Heath Jordaan, a cousin of Le Roux's whose name appeared on the staff page for the site. “I think I saw him for about a week or so that entire time.”

One of Le Roux's early clients was a German communications engineer named Wilfried Hafner, with whom he had corresponded online for several years about encryption. Hafner wanted to create a commercial encryption product that would combine some ele- ments of Le Roux's E4M with another piece of software, called Scramdisk. The new company would be called SecurStar, and its product DriveCrypt. Hafner hired Le Roux to help build it.

To Hafner, Le Roux seemed desperate for money. He'd remar- ried quickly, to a Dutch citizen from Curaçao named Lilian Cheung Yuen Pui, and they'd had a child not long after. He drove a beat-up car and worked out of a Rotterdam apartment so small that, on the phone, Hafner could often hear the baby crying in the back- ground. Hafner himself lived in the south of France at the time, and he said that Le Roux openly coveted his wealthier lifestyle. “He saw that these were rich places, and this was his dream,” Hafner said. “He said, ‘I am ambitious, I want to have all this.’”

Le Roux's relative, too, knew that the couple was struggling. “Lilian told me that they were dirt poor, both worked long hours, and the child was put into childcare for twelve hours a day,” she said. “She told Paul that if any other child was born their circum- stances had to change. He had promised her he would do everything in his power to change things.”

In his message board postings, Le Roux seemed increasingly bit- ter that he'd released E4M for free. “The whole point in the begin- ning of E4M was to publish the code to get peer review and help to enhance the product,” he wrote. “In the end people climbed onto my back, did not help one bit, bitched all the time, stole the code for incorporation into their own products, and generally abused the whole situation.”