She was having a party instead of mourning the death of her husband. To put the doubts to rest, a journalist from “Globe and Mail” traveled to India to learn the truth from the hospital where Gerry died. His report confirmed Gerry’s death, as the doctor provided him with every necessary detail. Gerry’s health had deteriorated significantly in a short period.

• By then, Quadriga ruled as the largest crypto exchange in Canada, putting through more than $1 billion of transactions in 2017.
• In 2016, Cotten became the sole director of Quadriga when all the other directors resigned.
• It was the behavior of a doomed gambler employing the martingale strategy, successively doubling down in a desperate effort to get back to zero, until he had dug a hole so deep that he could only be buried inside it.
• In Ernst & Young’s phrase—one imagines its battalion of stern accountants in various shades of apoplexy—“typical segregation of duties and basic internal controls did not appear to exist.” Most years Cotten neglected to file a personal tax return.
• The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months.
• The rapid decline of Cotten’s vitals are consistent with what a patient with the disease might experience, though according to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, a person is unlikely to die from it.

In 2014 Cotten spoke publicly of moving currencies between exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. It may be that he traded Quadriga’s funds in a frantic effort to recoup the losses he had sustained. It was the behavior of a doomed gambler employing the martingale strategy, successively doubling down in a desperate effort to get back to zero, until he had dug a hole so deep that he could only be buried inside it. After he squandered what remained in Quadriga’s coffers, the price of Bitcoin plunged, and there was a run on the exchange.

And some investors are suspicious that he may have faked his own death. “Some customers have even questioned the death of Mr Cotten, taking to social media platforms to demand proof in the form of an obituary or death certificate. According to Coindesk, a death certificate was included in the list of court documents.” But Cotten’s name was misspelled on death documents and he’d prepared his will just days before the honeymoon. They found he checked into a Jaipur hospital just nine days into his honeymoon due to an acute stomach ache. Thousands of customers paid his company to mine cryptocurrency for them.

The Hunt for the Crypto King: Where is Gerry Cotten now? Is he really dead?

This was the detail that most shocked cryptocurrency professionals. If you lose the private key to your cryptocurrency wallet—a long, randomly generated password, all but impossible to memorize—your funds are gone forever. The cautionary tales of fortunes lost because of misplaced private keys have the quality, in Bitcoin mythology, of the homilies delivered at religious gatherings. A couple of years after graduation, Cotten moved to Vancouver and joined a clubby community of entrepreneurs who had become enamored with Bitcoin. He attended meetups at coffee shops and dorm rooms, organized by a core group of about 10 people, who called themselves the Vancouver Bitcoin Co-op.

Lawyers for the customers of the exchange have asked that Cotten’s body be exhumed. Jennifer Robertson was on the receiving end of endless criticism. People raised their doubts when she had to announce that she did not have the passwords to the E-wallet. Ex-employees started discussing in the group chat about Jennifer’s inappropriate behavior at the funeral.

‘Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King’ Explained: How Did Gerry Cotten Scam His Users? Is Gerry Dead?

Some thought he was moving around, using different names whilst others suspected that if he was dead, he was either murdered or had taken his own life. By then, he and Cotten had already communicated with one another on a message board called TalkGold. It focused on high-yield investments, which promised impossibly fast and high returns. The site is said to have attracted a strange brew of people who ranged from gullible suckers to sharp hustlers hoping to rope them in. He had thick sweeps of strawberry-blond hair, boyish enthusiasm and the kind of sunny disposition that made people want to be around him. “After his death, it was discovered that Cotten had signed a will shortly before his fateful trip, leaving everything to his wife.”

That’s because he died at only age 30 in India, leaving behind a puzzling trail of encrypted passwords and missing money. Even more strange, it was revealed that Gerry had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. “In December 2018, Gerald Cotten, CEO of QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange died suddenly at age 30. Mr. Cotten was the only person who had passwords to ~115,000 customers’ digital wallets.” Throughout 2018, as Bitcoin prices crashed, customers of the exchange reported delays when attempting to withdraw dollars. C$28 million held by Costodian, a Quadriga payment processor, was frozen by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in January 2018.

He sent cash, in paper bags and shoeboxes, to coffee shops, laundromats, and pool halls. A year before his death he sent a colleague a photograph taken in the kitchen of his Kelowna home. On the polished granite island are a vase of pink roses, the discarded lid of an ice cream carton, a copy of National Geographic, and dozens of dictionary-thick, rubber-banded stacks of Canadian currency in crisp 20s, 50s, and 100s.

cryptocurrency

He lived the high life with his soon to be wife, Jennifer Robertson that included exotic vacations around the world. Cotten once bragged that he had traveled to 56 countries, 37 of them with Robertson. Around this time, Cotten met his future QudrigaCX co-founder, Michael Patryn on the TalkGold forum.

That is when internet sleuths and journalists started digging deep into Michael’s past. WHEN multi-millionaire crypto whizkid Gerry Cotten suddenly died on a dream honeymoon to India he left one hell of a mess behind – with some questioning whether he was really dead at all. In October, Robertson signed a settlement in the Quadriga bankruptcy case, agreeing to forfeit approximately C$12 million of assets to the creditor class. In a statement released by her lawyer, she said she had no knowledge of Cotten’s “improper” business practices and “was upset and disappointed” when she learned of them through the investigation. She expressed a desire to “move on with the next chapter of my life.” She may have to change her name one more time in order to do so. It begins with a few findings that do not fit neatly into the Royal Fuckup narrative.

Mystery of crypto CEO who died — or did he? — taking $250 million with him

In October 2004, TalkGold members began to debate whether Patryn might in fact be Omar Dhanani, one of 28 suspects who had been arrested by the U.S. Secret Service in a global sting operation targeting an online marketplace for stolen credit card information and forged documents. Dhanani, who was known on another message board as an expert in “washing” funds, was arrested in Southern California, where he was living with his family. Upon pleading guilty to conspiring to transfer stolen identification documents, he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.

As it turned out, Michael Patryn—as Michael Perklin and nearly everyone in the close-knit Canadian cryptocurrency community had known for years—was not really Michael Patryn. Which meant that Cotten was not really who he said he was either. But when co-founder Cotten died during a honeymoon in India, the money was seemingly lost forever. According to Globe and Mail, which did an exhaustive investigation into Cotten’s death, Cotten complained shortly after checking in that he had pain in his stomach.

On Jan. 14, 2019, more than a month after Cotten had passed away, the Quadriga community was notified of his death. They responded with shock and mourning — one described him as “a kind man with fine taste” — even as they struggled to withdraw money from his company. As the crypto market tanked, month by month clients saw their life savings evaporating. https://cryptolisting.org/ But all of that happened during the good times, when crypto was enjoying its upward surge. By December 2018, Bitcoin had dropped to $3,700 — still not bad if you bought it early, but terrible for the great majority who got in during the meteoric ascent. It didn’t hurt that Quadriga entered the crypto game at an opportune moment.

In 2013, Cotten launched QuadrigaCX, a bitcoin exchange company located in Canada. As a result, Cotten became the face of the rising interest in the new form of transaction. He was a young entrepreneur who lived the digital nomad life, attending meetings from every corner of the world.

Is Gerry Cotten really dead?

Investors were left without the cash they put in, while Cotten’s widow said she had no idea he was seemingly running a crypto scam. But his 2018 death in India left lenders with no what is defil way to access the cash – and a new Netflix documentary delves into the rumours around his disappearance. According to court filings, Quadriga also used WB21 as a payment processor.