Michaël de Marliave, alias Micode, in Paris, March 19, 2024 (AFP/JOEL SAGET)
From the tumultuous creation of a pirate social network to his millions of views videos where he infiltrates groups of cybercriminals, content creator Micode lives for the digital thrill.
Freshly shaved face, frank smile and false air of a business school student, the 24-year-old does not hesitate to pretend to be a computer hacker to witness scams live or challenge hackers to do so. find.
“We expose ourselves but no more than other investigative media,” Michaël de Marliave, alias Micode, tells AFP. “We are not the police, we do not represent a threat” for the scammers identified, some of whom even congratulated him for his work.
In one of his most popular videos, he infiltrates a group of criminals specializing in SMS fraud by integrating their messaging loops. Using their methods, he pushes one of them to try to scam a member of his team.
“The person picks up the phone and calls my accomplice who is in the next room,” he recalls. “I am witnessing the scam from start to finish.”
Its channels Micode and Underscore_, specializing in the popularization of new technologies, have respectively 1.25 million and 640,000 subscribers on YouTube and employ eight people through its company, Micorp.
– “Excitement of the investigator” –
His recipe: “to bring the excitement of the investigator to life” for his spectators, by carefully reconstructing his discoveries and answering practical questions on the usefulness of a virtual private network (VPN) or the dangers of illegal downloading .
Michaël de Marliave, alias Micode, in Paris, March 19, 2024 (AFP/JOEL SAGET)
“Very often, people are afraid for the wrong reasons,” notes Micode. “Knowledge allows us to have a much more peaceful relationship with technology.”
Everything is financed by partnerships or conferences, in addition to the monetization of its videos on the platform. According to him, “in educational formats, we would really have a hard time finding a model that lasts”.
Considerations far from the benches of Paris Descartes University, where, in 2017, the DUT computer science student avoided boredom by imagining his first videos on hacking, AI and the world of computers.
“I was making crazy discoveries and no one seemed interested,” recalls the man who, two years earlier, had experienced the virality, and the darker sides, of the Internet very closely.
Originally from Pau, this son of an engineer and a painter developed a passion for computers very early on. He gets his hands on cracking the passwords for the family computer, set up by his parents to curb his use of screens.
A high school student in Yvelines, in 2015 he created “Gossip”, an anonymous social network inviting his classmates in the region to post all kinds of messages. In two weeks, the site has more than 2,500 subscribers and Michaël de Marliave, of whom no one knows that he is the author, discovers “something a little exhilarating, you have the impression of being Mark Zuckerberg”.
– “Big stupidity” –
But, very quickly, he lost control of his creation: “there was harassment, vile messages that were posted”. Faced with the excitement of school officials and “on the advice of a lawyer”, he closed his site after 15 days.
“I was probably very naive on the subject at the time, it’s obvious that it was a big mistake,” concedes Micode. “But it’s a pretty seminal event in my history,” he adds, admitting to having realized at that moment that he wanted to “create things that work but not at any cost.”
With his chains, he now seeks to reproduce this “spark of magic but with positive things.”
An activity that he combines with another role: that of boss of a start-up. For two years, he has been developing a small box using artificial intelligence to manage an “autonomous control studio” called OneClickStudio. The goal: to produce a TV show or a live broadcast on a platform without going through a traditional management team.
To the point of stopping YouTube if it succeeds? “I don’t really see myself as an investor,” replies Micode. “What interests me is creating.”
If he does not exclude making his channel “a +pleasure+ activity” to have time to develop other things, the young man is far from wanting to leave his costume of clearing the digital jungle.
© 2024 AFP
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