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Here’s the exclusive story on howThe Last of Us came to physical life. Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story. He would have new names and passports, perhaps a new face. He might still be collaborating with Patryn, or Patryn might be trying to track him down in a final act of Con vs. Con. Cotten may be hoping Robertson will join him once all the investigations have concluded, or she may be just another one of his victims. He might be living on a private island, or in Hong Kong, Thailand, or Monaco, traveling by yacht and helicopter and private jet.
- If you have been following the Quadriga saga, you won’t find much new in “Bitcoin Widow.” Robertson is a hard person to feel sympathy for.
- Although neither of these theories has been proven, Cotten’s death is definitely one worth investigating.
- Greed feeds people to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, yet very few understand how they actually work.
- 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.
Cotten was doing business with Adam O’Brien who ran a Bitcoin ATM company. Cotten supplied O’Brien with crypto, and O’Brien, in turn, brought Cotten suitcases full of bills from the sale of bitcoin — $20 million in total, enough to raise most people’s eyebrows, but not Robertson’s. Quadriga could not get banking — banks don’t like dealing with crypto companies due to the high risk of money laundering. To get around that, Robertson describes how Cotten hired freelancers and had them set up bank accounts, so they could process funds on behalf of Quadriga.
Tag: Gerry Cotten
Cotten reportedly came into money rather quickly, allowing him to build his net worth and collection of assets. The Quadriga CEO was said to have owned 16 properties in Nova Scotia, Canada, a Cessna plane, and a $600,000 yacht. When Robertson was searching for new employment, Gerry suggested they take up their newfound wealth and invest in real estate. Robertson setup Robertson Nova, her residential property management company and started buying up real estate. Eventually, the pair owned 16 rental properties to the tune of $7.5 million . Robertson brought in her stepfather to help manage the properties and got herself a personal assistant, who would drink beer with her and listen to her woes when needed.
Both would become regulars on the message boards (“board whores”) and seek each other out on similar HYIP sites; Cotten averaged four posts a day on TalkGold alone. Patryn would tell friends that they’d first met in a con artist meet-cute, like the thieves in an Ernst Lubitsch film who fall in love while picking each other’s pockets. Cotten tried to scam Patryn; Patryn tried to counter-scam Cotten. Soon they were responding to each other’s public posts with inside jokes. One day he showed up with Cotten, who behaved like a runt little brother but, as one friend put it, “in a gross kind of way”—sycophantic, almost submissive.
Federal Bureau of Investigation were reportedly investigating the company. Lawyers for the customers of the exchange have asked that Cotten’s body be exhumed. We who have been keeping an eye on this case since the previous decade have our theories about it.
In this article, I’ll cover the basic storyline of what happened and what I learned from it. Still Cotten was not directly responsible for all of his troubles. Because Canadian banks refused to accept cryptocurrency businesses as clients, Quadriga had to rely on third-party processors, which levied outrageous fees and in some cases stole funds outright. One Quadriga contractor claims today that the payment processor WB21, now the subject of federal lawsuits in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, stole $14 million, and that another processor stole $5.8 million. This was the detail that most shocked cryptocurrency professionals.
Cotten said he had a helicopter license and offered to take Salkeld on a ride. Over several dozen hours of sailing lessons, the yacht dealer learned a few things about his customer. One of those bay islands—four acres of pine encircled by black sand—Cotten purchased that summer.
In December 2018, Gerry Cotten mysteriously died at the age of 30 during a trip to Jaipur, India. Officially, his death was ruled as a result of complications related to Crohn’s Disease, a lifelong condition that affects the bowel and large intestine and causes oftentimes painful inflammation. Cotten took over as the sole director of the company in 2016 ahead of cryptocurrency suddenly having an explosion of popularity in 2017, with an approximate $1 billion going through Quadriga. Gerry, full name Gerald, was a Canadian Bitcoin investor, who founded the cryptocurrency trading platform Quadriga CX. A report by auditor Ernst & Young also found funds were transferred to Cotten personally and to other parties.
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Now attorneys for QuadrigaCX’s investors are asking that Cotten’s body be exhumed, so that they can settle the question of whether he is really dead. “Cotten took advantage of this situation, treating his clients’ assets as corporate or personal funds that he could spend, trade and use at will and ultimately depleting those assets to such an extent that he brought down the entire platform.” The company eventually declared bankruptcy with $215.7 million in liabilities and about $28 million in assets. His death wasn’t announced with Quadriga users until a month later in January 2019, where the exchange went offline due to “maintenance”. Gerry’s wife, Jennifer, said that he had gone into septic shock after intestinal obstructions and perforations. But there was no autopsy conducted, with the death certificate signed off by the police with no objection, and returned to Canada where the body was swiftly embalmed.
According to the documentary, that’s around the time that Cotten started to invest his money in islands, cars and property, traveling the world while running his exchange. Before arriving in Jaipur, Cotten and Robertson had already traveled to some of India’s biggest tourist destinations, including the Taj Mahal and Varanasi. According to VanderKlippe’s reporting, they planned to stay in Jaipur for four days. Almost as soon as they arrived at the Oberoi Rajvilas, however, they left to seek medical care for Cotten. They wound up at the Fortis Escorts Hospital, a private hospital that offered superior medical service to most of India’s public hospitals. In 2014 Cotten spoke publicly of moving currencies between exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.
As for the money, some has been recovered, but the odds of everyone who got scammed getting the rest of it back is very slim. Even if Gerry did not fake his death and escape, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t still operating a criminal enterprise. The journalists, sleuths and Ontario Securities Commission determined that Gerry orchestrated a large-scale scam.
Episode 5: Where’s the Money Gerry?
Business picked up when Bitcoin hit the big time in 2017, reaching prices close to $20,000. 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. While Netflix mostly focused on the mystery of whether or not Cotten had faked his own death to escape with the money, I found the personal stories of the users whose lives had been ruined by his reckless behavior much more gripping. Perhaps that’s because, right now, so many similar stores are occurring.
When he died, the passwords disappeared, and the $190 million his company held became untouchable. Quadriga raised nearly C$850,000 in private capital, but Cotten ultimately abandoned the effort after a dispute with one of the major investors. Quadriga’s entire board resigned, leaving Cotten as Quadriga’s only full-time employee. In 2017, as the price of a Bitcoin shot to nearly $20,000, Quadriga processed nearly $2 billion in trades from 363,000 individual accounts. Given what the documentary tells us, it sounds like Gerry is really dead despite what online sleuths and conspiracy theorists might believe. Some of the reasons people believed he faked his death is that the funeral was closed casket, people don’t typically die from Crohn’s disease and a death certificate circulated with Gerry’s name misspelled.
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. Some Reddit users have suggested that Cotten faked his own death in order to defraud customers and abscond with the funds himself. At the time of his passing, he had over CA$250 million [$200 million] and the passwords to Quadriga’s accounts. According to the Netflix documentary, at least 110,000 customers were affected.
Despite not being licensed or registered by the central bank of the Philippines, Binance is still offering “crypto-to-fiat” services and organizing meetups, Infrawatch wrote in a letter to lawmakers. Users must have a legal mechanism to recover large amounts of money that have been stolen from them. Many would argue thatGerry Cottengot what was coming to him when he drew his last breath in India. I think it’s high-time Alex Mashinsky, Paolo Ardoino, Do Kwon, and the rest get what’s coming to them.
In January, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce froze $30 million in Quadriga funds. On top of that, as the price of bitcoin plummeted, more and more people were exiting their positions and trying to get their cash off the exchange. Little did they know, hardly any cash, or crypto, was left. 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. Once Canada’s largest crypto exchange, QuadrigaCX declared bankruptcy in April 2019 following the December 2018 death of its founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, who was solely responsible for the private keys of the exchange’s wallets.
Where is Gerry ‘Gerry’ Cotten Now?
Initially, she proposed to keep $5 million — money that never would have ended up in her name had Cotten not stolen millions from his customers. By then Quadriga was using “commercial payment processors” — her term for shadow banks that basically set up a network of bank accounts to funnel money to and from Quadriga customers. She said she knew nothing of Quadriga’s clients beyond what she needed to know to send them money. All told, 2018 was the year Quadriga started losing its wheels.
Whereas it’s certainly possible for a 30-year-old CEO in charge of handling millions in Bitcoin to die unexpectedly, that may not be the case with Cotten. After Cotten’s death was announced and people learned they couldn’t get their money out of Quadriga, theories began to form. When Cotten passed away, sources speculate his net worth https://coinbreakingnews.info/ was estimated to be around $190 million. Coincidentally, that’s the same amount his company had tied up in cryptocurrency when he died. Gerald Cotten and his business partner, Michael Patryn, launch QuadrigaCX on Boxing Day, 2013. There’s hype in the budding Bitcoin community and the small exchange seems to have a meteoric rise.
At the time of his passing, a sum of $250 million was owed to approximately 115,000 affected users. But blockchain analysts have yet to find any information that this money exists. Six money wallets were found to have next to no money in them. This includes his decision to change his will just nine days before he died, leaving everything to his wife of less than a year, Jennifer, including a $9.6 million estate and a $100,000 trust fund to look after their dogs. But this only caused further strain on the largely-unmanned operation of Quadriga, with Cotten not even working from a permanent office space. Later that year, the company lost ethereum in a smart contract error costing them a further $14 million.
It’s still common for holders to leave their assets with exchanges. A recent Binance report found 92 percent of the company’s institutional and VIP customers were storing funds with the company. Binance, despite its strong reputation, was one of several exchanges which suffered from major thefts in 2019. It was not big compared to, say, Coinbase or Binance, but it was Canada’s largest exchange and held a significant role in the country’s crypto industry as a result. And yet Canada hasn’t implemented stringent regulations on crypto exchanges following Quadriga’s collapse, even though the story has drawn considerable international attention. It took some time for the funds to be released to another bank, and then even more time for the funds to be accessible by anyone even remotely affiliated with Quadriga.
Soon enough, QuadrigaCX’s customers struggled to withdraw money from the exchange. Those who follow events in the digital currency markets today are probably nodding knowingly at this. This is the real price of the fraud, lies, and manipulation at the heart of the digital currency markets. Behind every trade is a real person with hopes, dreams, and financial needs.
EDITORIAL: Quadriga investors in crypto-quandary
Name was not the same as Robertson’s ex-husband, some angry investors lobbed death threats at Jennifer, convinced that she had murdered Cotten, too. 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. Some evidence suggested that Jennifer, if real, was acting strangely.