Dead Mans Switch: A Crypto Mystery
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She recently completed a teaching degree, with a view to teaching in a primary school. She’s had relationships – including one with the father of her new daughter – but none have worked out so far. Fear for her safety remains, especially after the Netflix documentary, which she says caused a spike in online searches for “where is Jennifer Robertson now?
However, one of the contributors to the doc claimed that even this will not be enough, “Even if they exhume the body, they’ll just say it’s not the real body”. Jennifer Robertson revealed on January 14 that her husband had died from complications related to Crohn’s disease on December 9 while travelling in India, where he was opening an orphanage. However, Mr Cotten appears to have failed to leave behind any note of a password or key to a digital “wallet” containing C$250 million (£145 million) of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for 115,000 account holders. Internet forums began buzzing with conspiracy theories when Gerald Cotten, the co-founder and chief executive of Quadriga CX, was reported by his wife to have died in December. Despite these challenges by 2018, QuadrigaCX was Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and had hundreds of thousands of customers. It spent a good few years as a small time cryptocurrency exchange before hitting difficulties.
The $190 million consists of both cryptocurrency and standard money and is held in «cold storage», which means it is stored in online wallets accessible by digital keys. It is the company , rather than the client, who has control over the funds. The film explores the bizarre story of a Canadian Bitcoin exchange which had $215 million in customer’s cash in its coffers when company founder Gerald Cotten mysteriously died, taking the passwords – and therefore the money – with him.
Construction crews are back at Dearborn, remaking Ford’s century-old industrial complex once again, this time for a post-petroleum era that is finally beginning to feel possible. That’s when my friend told me to always keep a bread clip when traveling. The Information Commissioner’s Office has issued the social media company with a notice of intent but said its findings in the notice are provisional. What they don’t know is just how damn sketchy seemingly legitimate exchanges can be. If you’ve been closely following the Gerald Cotten/QuadrigaCX saga for the past couple of years, this film leaves a lot to be desired.
Gerry’s name was misspelt on his death documents and he had prepared a will just days before his honeymoon. After that, just a single cold wallet remained active to deal with the day to day transactions and requirements of the exchange’s users. In December 2018, while in India to sponsor the construction of an orphanage, Cotten reportedly passed away due to complications from Crohn’s disease. It may take many more years before we find out the truth and the missing money might never resurface.
Who was the crypto king Gerry Cotten?
When Cotten reportedly passed away, he took with him the passwords to offline cold wallets which held as much as $190m in cryptocurrency. This money belonged to more than 100,000 customers, who found themselves out of pocket. As revealed in the documentary, many cryptocurrency investors believe that Cotten is still alive and staged his death to defraud customers and get out of paying back their money which he may not have had.
Following the announcement of Gerry’s death, the site went offline due to «maintenance» and it was revealed soon after that the company was being declared bankrupt. Bitcoin interest tanked in 2018, resulting in a wave of Quadriga CX customers rushing to withdraw their cash. Those who held Bitcoin with other companies also transferred their cryptocurrency to Quadriga CX due to the fact that they could actually make a little bit more money by doing so. While this resulted in a massive boom in people investing in the company,Quadriga CX quickly ran into financial difficulties. Gerry, who married around this time, didn’t have a permanent office space or enough employees to deal with the growing amount of customers. A computer issue wiped $14m of Ethereum cryptocurrency off the exchange.
- Crypto King shows how someone managed to leverage people’s enthusiasm for Bitcoin and crypto and took advantage of an emerging, unregulated market to defraud users of millions of dollars.
- Exchanges, such as Luno, use cold storage to keep customer funds safe and secure.
- Even so, the business faced cash flow problems and difficulties stemming from a fairly archaic accounting system.
- His death came four days after he completed a will, which left all of his assets to his wife, including $9million in real estate, a Lexus, Cessna plane and 50-foot Jeanneau 51 sailboat.
Plans to list on the Canadian Securities Exchange in 2016 fell apart and all directors other than Cotten left in the same year. What remains a matter of speculation leading to multiple death threats against Robertson, is just how much she knew about her husband’s business. In 2018, shortly after Cotten and Robertson had married, the couple travelled to India. In her book, Robertson writes in vivid detail about the day, in their luxury hotel in Jaipur, her husband started to experience extreme stomach pains. He was rushed to hospital where, after being transferred to the ICU, his condition quickly deteriorated, and he died, Robertson holding his hand. At the time, Gerry was the only person who had ‘keys’ to Quadriga CX’s wallet as he had not shared the highly confidential passwords with anyone else.
Gerald Cotten, the CEO and sole director of cryptocurrency exchange company, QuadrigaCX, died suddenly on 9 December during a trip to India. His death has left the company unable to repay $190 million (£110 million) to its clients as he was the only person with knowledge of the online passwords to access their funds. Meanwhile, in the wake of the whole scandal, the Quadriga money has never been traced. Investors like Tong Zou, an American who appears in the Netflix film, who lost his entire life savings to Cotten’s scam. He was part of a group of Quadriga users on the messaging app Signal, who took it upon themselves to investigate Cotten’s death.
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Crypto King, a new Netflix documentary, takes us through the rise and fall of QuadrigaCX and the theories surrounding the death of its founder, who took QuadrigaCX’s private keys with him to the grave. After Cotten died in 2018, customers lost access to $190 million of crypto assets. Some of these customers feature in the documentary and describe their experience of losing their funds and the part they played in an online investigation to find out what happened to their money. Featuring testimony from long-standing members of the crypto community, Netflix puts the focus of the doc on theories surrounding Cotten rather than examining Bitcoin and crypto itself.
QuadrigaCX, a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, has been left with a bill of US$190mln in client holdings, most of which it says it cannot repay, after the only person with the password to its offline storage died unexpectedly. The recent financial difficulties of a Canadian company are a timely reminder to think about your digital assets and accounts to ensure they can still be accessed even when you are no longer around. Gerald Cotten, the founder of Canada’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, died unexpectedly due to complications with Crohn’s disease. A month later, when his widow, Jennifer Robertson, announced his death to the world via a post on the Quadriga exchange website, creditors, journalists, regulators and cryptocurrency enthusiasts alike jumped on the story. Determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Gerry and who held the keys to the fortunes of 115,000 creditors.
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But Robertson claims she never liked that name, so – when she started dating Cotten – changed it again. What’s brought to light in the Netflix documentary is Cotten’s dark side. Beginning with him, aged just 15, meeting his business partner Michael Patryn over the online ponzi scheme forum, TalkGold. The unlikely pair – Patryn a macho amateur UFC fighter, and Cotten a reserved tech geek – founded QuadrigaCX in 2013. It was also a ponzi scheme, through which Cotten was using investors’ money to fund increasingly lavish purchases; a Tesla, a yacht, a plane.
Fifteen years later, Mr Cotten, known as Gerry, would be accused of swindling people online of a much bigger prize. He would grow up to be a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and run Canada’s largest crypto exchange, QuadrigaCX, before dying under bizarre circumstances in 2018, leaving investors looking for a missing $180 million Canadian dollars. Erald Cotten was 15 when he ran his first documented get-rich-quick scheme. The teen, a bright computer enthusiast from Belleville, Ontario, ran the operation on an online forum called TalkGold, and promised his investors inconceivable returns of up to 150 per cent in two days. He was able to keep the venture, called S&S Investments, going for three months, before it folded and investors’ money was gone.
In the book, she explains how Cotten’s dealings were wrapped up in a lot of crypto jargon. The piles of cash, he constantly told her, were the result of having to operate without the banks, who didn’t trust cryptocurrency. They cryptocurrency dogecoin exchange binance fees point to a number of suspicious details surrounding his death, including the fact that his will was changed to leave everything to his wife just nine days before he died and that his name was misspelt on his death certificate.
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Journalists from the Globe and Mail were fairly certain Cotten is actually dead after a visit to the hospital in India where a doctor confirmed Cotten’s death. QuadrigaCX customers that lost their crypto antier solutions records usd 50m liquidity in their crypto friendly banking platform still insist that this does not rule out foul play. There was no autopsy of Cotten’s body, adding fuel to the fires of conspiracy and leading some to demand his body be exhumed and examined further.
- The mysterious story of Gerald Cotton, CEO of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX is explored in the documentary ‘Dead Man’s Switch’ a crypto mystery and directed by Sheona McDonald.
- It is the company , rather than the client, who has control over the funds.
- Although he initially began the company with business partner Michael Patryn, Gerry took over as the sole director of the company in 2016, the year before cryptocurrency exploded into the mainstream.
- She began recalling whole conversations with Gerry that seemed entirely fabricated in retrospect.
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Gerald ‘Gerry’ Cotten was a Canadian Bitcoin investor who founded the cryptocurrency trading platform Quadriga CX back in 2013 when he was 25. Within just a few years, the company grew to become the largest of its kind in Canada. The death, and the resulting collapse of Quadriga, set off a score of government and citizen investigations into how so much digital currency could be spirited away. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? By clicking ‘Register’ you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to ourTerms of use,Cookie policyandPrivacy notice.
