This is a wild read. I'd recommend reading the article, but the tl;dr is...

He charged customers up to 20 times the ransom amount ($150K vs $8K in the example), paid the ransom to get their data back, and pocketed the difference as easy profit.

He refused to reveal his "trade secret" method, but it was all A-OK when they thought it was "magic", and now everybody's mad at being deceived. 😄