A stranger on an Internet forum once asked him, “What’s the prettiest city you have ever been to?” Baratov answered, “Meadowlands”-the subdivision where he lived. He rarely went further than the parking lot of the local grocery store, an eight-minute drive from his folks. Baratov spent a great deal of time field-testing his whips, putting his cars through their paces. It was less than two kilometres from his childhood home, and even after he moved in, he still ate dinner with his parents most nights. When Baratov was 20, he purchased a large detached home at 56 Chambers Drive for $642,500: it had double front doors, a closed-circuit security feed, a two-car garage where he parked his supercars and a little garden out front with a Japanese maple.
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He had a tattoo that ran down his forearm, a bit of binary code that spelled “Karim.” At age 20, he bought this house for $642,500. Others were under half-hearted aliases-Karim Taloverov, Kay or Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov. After a commenter asked him if he was a Russian assassin, he quipped sarcastically: “How did you know?” Some of the social media accounts were in his own name, with photos of his cars parked in his parents’ driveway. When someone asked how he was able to afford his cars, he’d chalk it up to good luck. On Instagram, where he identified as an entrepreneur, a programmer, a web developer and a workaholic, he posted photos of the luxuries he showered upon himself. It was as if he couldn’t help but show off how lucrative his secret was. He never planned to leave his hometown of Ancasterīaratov was coy about the nature of his labour but fulsome about its fruit, driving his cars through the neighbourhood and uploading their images to the web. He usually affixed one of his two trademark vanity plates to his cars: “Mr Karim” or “Karrrim.” Shown here at the Niagara Escarpment. He held on to the baby-blue Lamborghini Gallardo for almost a year before getting bored with it. There was another Mercedes and an Aston Martin. He acquired a white Audi, then swapped it out for a Porsche. He went on to buy a BMW, which he regretted because it depreciated too quickly. His first car, which he got while he was still in high school, was a Mercedes. To call him an aficionado wouldn’t do justice to the rapaciousness of his obsession. He had two Rolexes and a taste for Armani, but it wasn’t until he started collecting cars that people wondered where the cash was coming from. By 15, he reportedly made his first million. By 14, he claimed to be earning more than both of his parents combined. Some of these sites provided hacking services, offering customers access to any email inbox they wanted. Over the next few years, he registered over 80 websites to his name.
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He decided he’d never work for free again. At first he refused to take her money, but eventually, at her insistence, Baratov accepted $200, which seemed to him a fortune. When he finished, she asked how much she owed him. One day, someone he described online as a “random wealthy woman” reached out to him to do some work-he kept the exact nature of that work hidden from his friends and family. A year later, he made his first dollar on the web. When Baratov was 12, he taught himself to code-the hobby of a brilliant but lonely boy in a new country. At the same time, he could be silly and immature, with a fondness for “your mom” jokes. “Get up and change it yourself.” He had a hard-nosed tenacity, and he clung to the idea that people make their own luck. “Life does not have a remote,” he once tweeted.
He had a gift for coining aphorisms, sometimes motivational and sometimes sullen. By the time he was 15, he’d made his first millionīaratov was boyish and clean-cut, with cherubic cheeks, shapely eyebrows and a neat hairline terminating in a widow’s peak. Baratov arrived in Canada in 2007 and quickly taught himself to code. Kazakhstan does not permit dual citizens, so in 2011 the entire family renounced their Kazakhstani citizenship to become Canadian. Baratov’s father was a veterinary biologist at a company called Vetaktiv. They settled in Ancaster, the picturesque Hamilton suburb, buying a large brick home with a two-car garage in the affluent Meadowlands neighbourhood. In 2007, at age 12, he emigrated from Kazakhstan to Canada with his parents, Akhmet and Dinara, and older sister, Sabina.
At one point, he almost flunked out of high school. He was just too busy with his online world to study, sometimes even to show up to class. His grades weren’t great, but not because he was stupid-far from it. Baratov believed school was a waste of his time, its educational benefits next to nil, and good for little more than socializing. He was bright but undisciplined, and he was hypnotized by that machine. As a kid, Karim Baratov spent too much time on his computer.
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