What really happened to Gerald Cotten? Netflixs new true crime documentary, Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King, looks at the millionaires mysterious death South China Morning Post

In June 2020, the Ontario Securities Commission officially concluded that Quadriga was indeed a fraud and a Ponzi scheme. In January 2019 Ernst & Young reported that Quadriga did not have a bank account, but instead used third-party payment processors. The business was run from Cotten’s encrypted laptop from Cotten’s home in Fall River, Nova Scotia.

He saw himself as an enforcer—of rules, of integrity, of loyalty. Since Cotten’s death, an ongoing conversation about the Quadriga affair has been conducted on Telegram, an encrypted messaging application that resembles WhatsApp, only with heightened privacy measures. The chat group Quadriga Uncovered has nearly 500 members, many of them creditors who use the forum to discuss details of the claims process and share revelations and theories about the case.

Cotten had cultivated skills from years of illicit activities in covering his tracks. He knew how to create fake identities and owned planes and a boat he could use to escape. There’s ample evidence pointing to the idea that Cotten was indeed planning an exit scam and that he was a con artist.

Quadriga’s lawyer Maurice Chiasson said the money will run out in two weeks, if not sooner. Also buried in the monitor’s report are signs EY may be getting frustrated in its dealings with Robertson and her stepfather Tom Beazley. Letter to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia on March 13. He explained that his firm was stepping down in response to concerns brought up by court-appointed monitor Ernst & Young. More than six months since Intercontinental Exchange , the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, revealed its plans for a bitcoin futures market, Bakkt is still awaiting regulatory approval. CBOE Futures Exchange , the first U.S. exchange to introduce a bitcoin futures product in December 2017, has decided to pull the plug onbitcoin futures trading.

Introducing the World’s First Chat and Pay Crypto Wallet: Over 100k…

It begins with a few findings that do not fit neatly into the Royal Fuckup narrative. Cotten had mentioned having a safe bolted to the rafters in the attic of his home in which he had stored the passwords to his various cryptocurrency accounts. After learning of his death, one of his contractors immediately went to the house and searched for it. He found the place in the attic where four holes had pia dns servers been drilled through the rafters. Patryn had said that Cotten was “like a little brother to me.” This was how those who had known both of them saw it too, though the characterization usually wasn’t intended as a compliment. At a time when the Bitcoin Co-op was a small group of crypto enthusiasts who met in each others’ apartments, Patryn wrote them an email out of the blue, expressing his support.

• But when she met Cotten at the Toronto Bitcoin hub Decentral, she found him funny and sweet.
• Bloomberg also identified Patryn as Dhanani, showing that he had officially changed his name from Omar Dhanani to Omar Patryn in British Columbia in March 2003 and changed it again to Michael Patryn in October 2008.
• Tether parted ways with its accountant in January 2018 , and it has never had a proper audit.
• In other words, access to somewhere around $190 million in cryptocurrency potentially vanished with Cotten’s death.
• Oddly, the death of Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten was announced on January 14, the exact same day Cryptopia was hacked.

Globe goes to Cotten’s hospital in India to put the whole “fake death” thing to bed. Reporters had a hunch that this was Gerry Cotten, and traced the account to another online den of thieves, BlackHatWorld. After some more digging, the reporter found an order form filled out by one Gerald Cotten.

Manage Account

While the large increase in volume increased commissions, it also caused cash-flow problems due to the exchange’s reliance on external payment processors and its lack of a proper accounting system. In June 2017, Quadriga announced that they had lost ethereum worth US$14 million due to a smart contract error. Quadriga likely never invested the funds entrusted to it, according to Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency tracking firm. Either the funds were never received or quickly went missing.

Nobody was expecting bbc news bitcoin gordon ramsay, the CEO of Canadian Bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX, to die at 30. Cotten was young, energetic, passionate about cryptocurrency — so when he passed away in December 2018 during his honeymoon in India, due to “complications from Crohn’s disease,” everyone was taken by surprise. While it can be harmful to innovation if overbearing when taken too far, askingexchangesto keep real dollars in federally-insured banks to cover customer deposits, and forcing them to prove it, harms nobody. Only those with sinister intentions are against such common-sense rules. Nobody in the digital currency markets can be trusted.

The trading activities were massive – the report detailed that between 2016 and 2018, Cotten transferred 9,450 bitcoin, 387,738 ether and 239,020 litecoin out of the exchange’s accounts. Some Reddit users have suggested that Cotten faked his own death in order to defraud customers through an exit scam, while others believe that Cotten’s zulutrade review death exposed a Ponzi scheme. On 13 December 2019, the court-appointed law firm representing the exchange’s former users sent a letter to the RCMP asking that they exhume Cotten’s body to confirm his identity and verify a cause of death. CoinDesk reports that crypto funds were moving through the Quadriga platform up to Cotten’s death.

Crypto researcher ZachXBT alerted the crypto community in a tweet on Dec. 19, highlighting the five wallets that transferred around 104 Bitcoin on Dec. 17 to various wallets. Users must have a legal mechanism to recover large amounts of money that have been stolen from them. Using the legal system to recover funds is a good thing.

The company had announced that it would work to get the Bitcoin out of the cold wallets. The mysterious death of QuadrigaCX’s founder and CEO followed by the collapse of the exchange had sparked conspiracy theories that the founder faked his own death as part of a fraudulent exit scam. Medical experts told The Globe and Mail that Cotten’s symptoms and rapid decline suggest he had a perforated bowel, which can cause extremely sudden death. But no autopsy was performed on Cotten’s body, so nobody can be sure why, exactly, he died — a fact that’s encouraged conspiracy theorists who believe that Robertson poisoned her husband or that he’s not dead at all. In December 2019, investors were clamoring for Cotten’s body to be exhumed in order to verify the cause of death.

Quadriga co-founder Michael Patryn was identified by The Globe and Mail as Omar Dhanani, who was convicted on identity theft charges in the U.S. and served 18 months in Federal prison. Dhanani also had pleaded guilty to burglary and grand theft charges and had been deported to Canada. Bloomberg also identified Patryn as Dhanani, showing that he had officially changed his name from Omar Dhanani to Omar Patryn in British Columbia in March 2003 and changed it again to Michael Patryn in October 2008.

Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King – What happened to Gerry Cotten?

Roughly $220 million CAD ($165 million USD) is still missing or unaccounted for after Quadriga became insolvent. The firm will continue to represent the estate of Jennifer Robertson, Cotten’s widow. Now a reporter has come forward saying that after he wrote a story on WB21, a thug appeared at his door. If you were going to be involved in a dodgy business, why would you use an email address that pointed directly to you? That seems like a dumb thing to do, but then Cotten was still a young con at this stage. S&S Investments went for sometime before cracks started to appear.

In a series of transactions sent from the exchange’s internet-connected hot wallets, more than 9,000 ETH moved from Quadriga to a handful of other exchanges, including Binance, Bitfinex, Kraken and Poloniex. Most of that crypto was transferred the week before Cotten’s death, but there is no telling who initiated the transactions—the exchange, its customers, or both. You have to scratch your head till it bleeds on that one. Why was anyone at Quadriga allowed to touch those coins after the company applied for creditor protection? EY is now moving to safeguard the remaining crypto, a stash now down to 51 bitcoin, 33 bitcoin cash, 2,032 bitcoin gold, 822 litecoin, and 951 ether, worth a current value of $434,068 CAD. Basically, more than half the money in the hot wallets is now gone.

We should wish Dr. Wright luck in proving it can be done. The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only. All advice, including picks and predictions, is based on individual commentators’ opinions and not that of Minute Media or its related brands. No one should expect to make money from the picks and predictions discussed on this website.

Trustee investigating ‘unauthorized’ transfer of bitcoin from previously inaccessible QuadrigaCX wallets

Like several other skeptics, I thought bitcoin would crash months ago. I wrote a review of Jennifer Robertson’s book “Bitcoin Widow.” She was married to Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten. Her book comes out Jan. 18, near the three-year anniversary of when she announced Cotten’s death to stunned investors—a month after he died! David Gerard also wrote a scathing review of the book, which you can find here.

He treated customer funds like his own personal bank account—a bit like Bernie Madoff, only a lot more recklessly. Binance does not have a securities registration in Ontario. Yet, incredibly, after promising the Ontario Securities Commissions that it would stop allowing Ontario residents to use its platform after Dec. 31, the crypto exchange turned around and told its users not to worry. Michael Patryn, the early cofounder of failed crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, has returned to crypto. A convicted felon, Patryn slid out of public view after Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten died in India, and all the news came out about Cotten running Quadriga like a Ponzi.

So negligent was Quadriga in its bookkeeping that it appears to have lost track of some of its money altogether. EY located a Quadriga bank account at the Canadian credit union containing $245,000 CAD ($184,000 USD). The majority of the recoverable money will likely come from Quadriga’s third-party payment processors. The firm was also representing the estate of dead Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten and his wife Jennifer Robertson.

The Story Behind QuadrigaCX and Gerald Cotten, Netflix’s ‘Crypto King’

If anyone wants to learn more about the events leading to the collapse of Canada’s largest crypto exchange, I’m told the video should be up within 30 days. According to the report, from 2016 onwards, QuadrigaCX went completely off the rails. Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s now-deceased CEO, clearly had no interest in running a legitimate business.

Blockstream, the company responsible for a huge chunk of bitcoin’s code, along with iFinex—the parent company of stablecoin issuer Tether and crypto exchange Bitfinex—are partnering with El Salvador to create the volcano bonds. The bonds will be issued on Blockstream’s Liquid Network. 0xSifu’s wallet currently has $70 million worth of crypto in it. Earlier, it held over $450 million worth of various coins. MyCrypto founder Taylor Monohan, who was in the QuadrigaCX documentaryDead Man’s Switch, tagged Patryn’s wallet in 2019, after she herself lost money on QuadrigaCX.

It buys LR bought in bulk from Liberty Reserve and sells LR in smaller quantities, charging 5% on every transaction. By using exchangers, Liberty Reserve was able to avoid collecting ID information on its users. Wired.) Note that Dhanani appears not to have faced charges for operating an E-gold exchanger. Paved the way for other digital currencies, including Liberty Reserve, to take its place in underground economies.

Ponzi Scheme

According to an investigation by Canada’s Globe and Mail, Cotten died from complications related to Crohn’s Disease and Robertson returned to Canada with his body. Sign up for Money Reimagined, our weekly newsletter exploring the transformation of value in the digital age. Until then, the evidence at hand does leave room for debate. Putting together all we know, it looks most likely that while Cotten was planning to disappear, he died an untimely death in India in 2018.