THE MAIN PLAYERS Alexander Nix, CEO

He founded Cambridge Analytica in 2014 and claims to have worked on 260 political campaigns globally. Wylie says Nix (42), who went to prestigious private school Eton College in the UK, has the gift of the gab and with his plummy British accent can talk people into doing just about anything.

Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica

The controversial former editor-in-chief of right-wing US website Breitbart was invited to join the board in 2014 to help Cambridge Analytica make inroads in the US. He went on to become Trump’s right-hand man. After the election he served as the president’s chief strategist but after they fell out last year Bannon (61) briefly returned to Breitbart.

Robert Mercer, investor

He’s a computer scientist and one of the wealthiest men in America through his hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Mercer (71) uses his fortune to back conservative causes. Bannon reportedly talked him into donating $15 million (then about R172,5 million) to help launch Analytica.

Christopher Wylie, data analytics expert

At the tender age of 24, while studying in London for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, the Canadian worked for Analytica. He came up with the plan to harvest Facebook profiles in order to access information that would give the company the inside edge. “We broke Facebook,” he says.

Aleksandr Kogan, Cambridge professor and data scientist

As a psychology lecturer and expert in socialmedia psychometrics at a respected British university, Kogan (33) was authorised by Facebook to collect profile data through the apps he developed, but it was meant to be for research purposes only.

Using his app Thisismydigitallife he offered Facebook users a chance to take a personality test. More than 270 000 people took the quiz and in so doing gave Kogan access not only to their own profile but to those of all their friends. He sold all this data, which was mainly harvested from American Facebook users, to Analytica.

“What Kogan offered us was something that was way cheaper, way faster and of a quality that nothing matched,” Wylie says. He’s revealed that the data included things such as status updates, likes and even private messages.

“We’d only need to touch a couple of hundred thousand people to expand into their entire social network, which would then scale us to most of America,” Wylie adds.

Yet Kogan insists he did nothing wrong. “We thought we were doing something that was really normal,” he says.

The data included things such as status updates, likes and even private messages