me from a poorly paid job at a magazine situated in the heart of the tech industry’s extravagance, Le Roux as a technical virtuoso unable to capitalize on the riches flowing from the online world. His story struck me as in many ways similar to that of startup founders I’d covered over the years, whose biographies often par- alleled his. The Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world were often, like Le Roux, computer-obsessed teenagers who built companies and fortunes out of their passion, just as software began to rule the world. Le Roux, it seemed to me, may have turned to the dark side of technology in pursuit of the same wealth and influ- ence for which tech entrepreneurs were routinely celebrated on the covers of magazines.

I’d always been intrigued by that dark side myself, seeking out stories about clandestine worlds and assumed identities. Once, for a story in Wired, I’d tried to disappear into a new identity for a month while the magazine offered $5,000 to anyone who could find me. (They did, tracking me to New Orleans, where I was liv- ing in a dingy apartment rented with a fake ID.) The more I learned about Le Roux, the more I wanted to know how he’d done it, how he had brought so many people along with him, and how it had all gone so wrong.

A few weeks after my trip to Minneapolis to meet Moran Oz, in late 2015, I caught a fifteen-hour flight from New York to Hong Kong, and then another two hours on to Manila. I checked into a simple, whitewashed hotel in Makati City. Le Roux himself was long gone from the Philippines by the time I arrived, having de- camped for Brazil and countries beyond. But the vestiges of his dominion remained. My hotel was a few blocks from the BDO building, the glass tower whose fourteenth floor had served as the hub of RX Limited’s call center business. Around the corner were the Salcedo Towers, where Le Roux had once occupied both pent- houses, and his former pub, Sid’s, on the border of the red-light district. It was the first of two trips I would make to the Philippines over the next two years, attempting to sift through the remnants of his operation and track down people who had been inside it.