Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. After Cotten's death, she agreed to forfeit $12 million in assets that included vehicles and real estate. 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. ^ "Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing crypto millions". But on December 9, 2018, Gerry died at a local hospital because of complications resulting from Crohns disease at the age of 30. While Jennifer said she stopped processing payments in 2016, customer receipts showed the firm continued paying customers in 2017. He began to host the weekly meetups at Quadrigas office. In its registration documents, Midas Gold listed as its contact gerald.cotten@gmail.com. It didn't take long for the withdrawals to become greater than Quadriga's profits. Jack Julian joined CBC Nova Scotia as an arts reporter in 1997. The Quadriga Fund was an HYIP that claimed to invest in venture capital projects and foreign currency exchange markets; it could be funded with Liberty Reserve and Bitcoin, using payment processors operated by Patryn. She can be reached at cassandra.williams@cbc.ca, on Twitter @cassiehwilliams, With files from Andrew Chang and CBC's The National, Audience Relations, CBC P.O. A couple of years after graduation, Cotten moved to Vancouver and joined a clubby community of entrepreneurs who had become enamored with Bitcoin. His parents owned an antiques store; Cotten decided to go into crypto. GROWING PAINS "Whenever people put their money into the exchange, he sort of used it as his personal slush fund," she said. (For his part, Patryn says he hasnt seen any reason to think that [Cotten] is alive.). Needless to say, the fund's clients were thoroughly disappointed. In leaked text messages sent before his death, Cotten bragged about his extravagances (Im still cleaning the mess from our fondue party we had on the weekend lol); mentioned having a safe bolted to the rafters in the attic; joked about retiring soon; and referred to his honeymoon in scare quotes. Where Is Jennifer Robertson, The Widow Of The 'Crypto King,' Now? - Bustle Far more likely is the narrative of Gerry the Royal Fuckup. He was busy. It seemed like they had an understanding, and shared motives. Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotten married in 2018. Some of the early visitors to the Vancouver Quadriga office even thought the exchange was just a show. Cotten flushed. Cotten said he had a helicopter license and offered to take Salkeld on a ride. Sometimes hed say he was Michael from Pakistan. The little brother under the thumb finally grew some balls. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked questions so rudimentary that they shocked the experts they interviewed. $215M missing: Mysterious death of CEO of Canada's largest Netflixs Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King delves into the circumstances surrounding Gerrys death and what happened to the company after that. She appeared with him, and even introduced him, at conferences. More than 75,000 Quadriga account holders also had questions. Quadrigas entire board resigned, leaving Cotten as Quadrigas only full-time employee. In a gambit of either flagrant carelessness or irrepressible egotism, Dhanani officially changed his name to the pseudonym he had used in his online criminal ventures, first to Omar Patryn and later to Michael Patryn. Unsolved crimes attract amateur detectives, who canvass the internet for clues. Castor said Cotten operated Quadriga like a Ponzi scheme. Gerald 'Gerry' Cotten founded Quadriga CX, which he dubbed Canada 's best Bitcoin exchange. An Unexpected Twist: QuadrigaCX Clients are Doubting Cotten's Death They traced the relationship back to 2003, to a dingy warren of a website called TalkGold. After hearing that Patryn had been bragging all over Vancouver about his talent for laundering money, Mueller unearthed the connection to Dhanani. In December 2018, Jennifer and Gerry traveled to Jaipur, India, for their honeymoon. At the time, Gerry ran QuadrigaCX and profited from Bitcoins astronomical rise in value. Flickering banner ads for investments in precious metals and foreign exchange funds and real offshore returns buffered message boards offering something for everyone: scammers, marks, and those who belonged to both categories. He is now a data journalist in Halifax, and you can reach him at (902) 456-9180, by email at jack.julian@cbc.ca or follow him on Twitter @jackjulian, Audience Relations, CBC P.O. 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. Whats your goal? replied the yacht salesman, in the delicate manner of his trade. Roberston said she's sorry for Cotten's actions and the harm he's caused. 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. He might still be collaborating with Patryn, or Patryn might be trying to track him down in a final act of Con vs. Con. After Gerrys death became public, she maintained that the attorneys decided to hold off on announcing it earlier. His wife, Jennifer Robertson, said he promised to create a mechanism that would give her the passwords after his death. 'Bitcoin widow' reveals how she fell victim to her own husband - Yahoo Most of the homes are in metro Halifax. When Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten died suddenly in 2018, the passcodes for his cryptocurrency exchange died with him. When he did file, he claimed no income from Quadriga. And the fact that he did what he did I carry his shame with me. He began his own HYIP chat site by December, and on January 1, 2004he was 15 and a halfhe launched his first pyramid scheme, S&S Investments. Who was the crypto king Gerry Cotten and what happened to him? Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing crypto millions | CBC News Loaded. You couldnt hook up your bank account to anywhere. The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. "I did let that go to the lawyers and the contractors, and I trusted that they knew what to do," she said. As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. But within a month after Cottens reported death, blockchain investigators proved that nearly all of the inaccessible wallets were empty. gerald cotten belize Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canadas east coast. The same blind faith that attracts the marks also drives them away. Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing - CBC She is trying to put her life back together and is working as a waitress part-time. When Patryn told a stupid joke that nobody found funny, Cotten would burst into wild laughter. Cotten returned for lessons the following summer, though not as often. The couple traveled abroad constantly, and they planned to sponsor a home for 12 children at an orphanage in India. Midas Gold, which had begun to accept Bitcoin, was seized too. He loved to fly: planes, helicopters, drones. It just seemed so out of character for Gerry not to have any kind of backup plan, says Michael Perklin, who started the worlds first blockchain security consultancy and had worked for CaVirTex. After learning of his death, one of his contractors immediately went to the house and searched for it. 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. It was also revealed that Cotten had written his will just four days before leaving for India. Gerry and Alex [Hanin, a web developer] created and ran Quadriga, with Gerry running operations.) By 2015, however, the same information that the TalkGold community had gleaned a decade earlier was starting to surface on Reddit: that Michael Patryn was really Omar Dhanani, a convicted thief and defrauder with ties to organized crime. The ethical distinctions between the models may have been vanishingly subtle, but the logic of the con would predict its fate, and Cottens. Cotten passed away from complications that arose from Crohn's disease while on a honeymoon in Indiaapparently taking some $215 million of customer funds to the grave. Matt Galloway talks to his widow, Jennifer Robertson, about what she did and didnt know. "He was the nicest, caring, most loving husband. They always end our conversations with that question. QCXINT, the creditor and blockchain expert, said that the FBIs Vander Veer told him that with hundreds of millions of dollars missing and no body, its an open question. The only way to verify that the body Robertson brought home from India was Cotten is to exhume it. [4] In her memoir, Bitcoin Widow: Love . He seemed to prefer acquaintances over friends. $215M missing: Mysterious death of CEO of Canada's largest The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. EXIT SCAM @exitscampod Twitter profile | Pikagi He cleared trees and built a house, though he had no apparent plans to move in. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The amateurs most valuable advantage is time. Robertson said she understands many people have been hurt and lostlargesums due to the collapse of QuadrigaCX. The RCMP, which has jurisdiction over the case, has thus far not done so. Most HYIPs, including those previously operated by Cotten, were exit scams: Ponzis that, after reaching a critical volume, abruptly close up shop. Patryn told reporters after Cottens death that they had met online over five years ago, but this was about as accurate as calling himself an adviser to Quadriga when in fact he had been the cofounder. Jennifer Robertson is the widow of Gerald Cotten, who died suddenly in India in December, leaving his business in chaos and as much as $180 million of cryptocurrency locked in his encrypted laptop and USB keys. If you lose the private key to your cryptocurrency walleta long, randomly generated password, all but impossible to memorizeyour funds are gone forever. See tweets of EXIT SCAM @exitscampod on Twitter. Canadian real estate developer Jennifer Robertson met Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten on Tinder in 2014. But he never did. Gerry was a very careful person who well understood the need to back up ones private keys. It concerned Quadrigas cofounder. It was quickly very clear that he wasnt who he said he was. It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges. He befriended Cotten in 2016 in Toronto, where Cotten had moved during the effort to take Quadriga public. Now recruiting: Nova Scotia starts testing foreign-trained family doctors, Meet the student who went straight from a Kenyan refugee camp to Acadia, Home repair program in Yarmouth County aims to patch gaps in getting help, CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices. They were an odd pair. According to her, Gerry was in charge of the accounts by then. He seemed lonely. They settled on a customized Jeanneau 51 with a pink and cream interior: three cabins, a dining area for six, a dishwasher, a gas stove, a washer and dryer, an en suite bathroom with standing shower, and a swim platform with teak battens. Jennifer Robertson, Cotten's widow, said her husband moved most of the digital assets to cold storage, and experts she brought in to try to hack into his other computers and mobile phone met . Be a smarter, safer investor in eight weeks. As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. Cotten built his career on the insight that most people are willing to believe most of what they are told most of the time. Jennifer met Gerry in November 2014 on Tinder. Widow of Bitcoin trader Gerald Cotten who died owing $215M tells of And the fact that he did what he did I carry his shame with me. Gabby Petitos Life WithAnd Death ByBrian Laundrie. He rejected Quadrigas application and forwarded his investigation to contacts in law enforcement. On Tuesday, a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge grantedQuadriga's request for creditor protection from as many as 115,000 clients who, according to court documents,are owed roughly $250 million. By painstakingly searching archived data from deleted websites, communicating on encrypted messaging services with anonymous sources, and analyzing public registration data, the Quadriga creditor who goes by the online moniker QCXINT, and a handful of other obsessives with handles like runbtc and Zerononcense, reconstructed the pairs entangled online lives. A podcast about the collapse of the crypto exchange Quadriga after the death of its founder in India. Among those Mueller warned was Amber Scott, an anti-money-laundering expert at a compliance firm in Toronto called Outlier Solutions. ', "And he was like, 'No, I'm the only one with banking connections, I'm the only one that knows how to work it.' Since the cost of Ernst & Youngs investigation is borne by the class, it made little sense to spend resources on highly speculative inquiries without assurance of success. Through social media posts, court records, and other primary sources, author Kathleen Hale forensically reconstructs their lives before the crime, and the night they were killed. Hi, he said. Furthermore, Gerry signed his will less than two weeks before his death, leaving all of his assets to Jennifer. [3] Robertson's first marriage, to Jacob Forgernon, ended in divorcer. (In response to these allegations, Patryn denied the existence of check printing machines and pay stubs and suggested that visitors to the office were confused by scanners and cash counters.). After Bitcoin collapsedand the withdrawal complaints turned into lawsuits, negative press, and the threat of a formal investigationCotten got married, wrote a will, flew to India for his honeymoon, and disappeared. In this way Cotten could have stowed away a fortune in foreign bank accounts in preparation for a grand exit. Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp. shut down in January following the death of founder and Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cotten, leaving some 115,000 customers out of pocket for about $260 million in cryptocurrencies and cash. That was our perception, at least., (Patryn has argued the reverse: that he quit Quadriga because he disagreed with Cottens decision to abandon the public listing. Be a smarter, safer investor in eight weeks. She was apologetic about people losing their money, saying, I would have never, ever stolen from other people. She left behind a dozen teddy bears they had planned to deliver to the Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotten Home for Orphaned Children. His news career began on the morning of Sept. 3, 1998 following the crash of Swissair 111. Patryn joined TalkGold on April 3, 2003, the year the site launched. There was also the fact that these were Canadian people, Canadian companies. This meant that multiple customers were missing over $180 million. But users claimed they received deposits from Jennifer directly, seemingly contradicting her statement. They usually did the outreaching; nobody had reached out to them before. "I would have never, ever stolen from other people. Its object was not to track down every lost Bitcoin but to maximize the pot of money that could be returned to Quadrigas creditors. Cotten knew the catchphrases and the talking points, but he seemed most interested in Bitcoins speculative possibilities. He never mentioned Patryn in her presence again. Cotten's company, QuadrigaCX, expanded exponentially, and the twentysomethings soon became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. In February 2014, six weeks after Quadriga launched, Mt. But the safe was gone. In April 2013, around the time that Cotten appeared in Vancouver, the price of a Bitcoin had risen to $266. Nobody knew how to find the money. Were excited, said Cotten at the time, to be able to provide an unparalleled level of transparency.. In Ernst & Youngs phraseone imagines its battalion of stern accountants in various shades of apoplexytypical segregation of duties and basic internal controls did not appear to exist. Most years Cotten neglected to file a personal tax return. But in February 2018, his. Gerald Cotten may have had a sophisticated grasp of cryptocurrency, but his expertisehis formal traininglay in the art of the confidence game. Cotten was a computer nerd who had entered the right business at the right time and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. 'Bitcoin widow' reveals how she fell victim to her own husband's $215m All of it looked bad, but there was no confession of criminality. By that point, however, a new Gerald Cotten venture was already six months old. He named his boat the Gulliver, after the traveler who trusted himself to the mercy of the waves and swam as fortune directed him. Back in 2018, 30-year-old Cotten took a trip to India with his now widow Jennifer Robertson for their honeymoon and to open an orphanage. With that, Bitcoin became like any other form of currency, a mass delusion: Its value derived from the belief that it had value. It was difficult to imagine that this particular trait was contrived, but later, after it was revealed that nearly everything about him was a work of pure contrivance, you had to wonder whether the incessant smiling was just another part of the act. He summoned a future in which the customer was already a proud captain astride a luxury pleasure vessel dividing a turquoise sea. The sudden death of Gerald Cotten in December 2018 plunged the world of cryptocurrency into chaos. It was weird, says Joseph Weinberg, the founder and CEO of several digital currency businesses, who was then a college student and an early attendee of Bitcoin Co-op meetings. (TalkGold was run by twins Edward and Brian Krassenstein until 2016, when agents from the Office of Homeland Security seized their files and froze their assets but never charged them with a crime. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia; their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon. Cotten may be hoping Robertson will join him once all the investigations have concluded, or she may be just another one of his victims. Regarding speculation that he was still alive, Jennifer said, I saw Gerry die; I was holding his hand when he passed away. After he squandered what remained in Quadrigas coffers, the price of Bitcoin plunged, and there was a run on the exchange. As Quadriga customers tried to pull their money from the exchange, they were met with long waits to access their funds. From our perspective, we needed Quadriga, says Andrew Wagner, who at the time was the co-ops director of public relations. She later explained it, saying, I hadnt understood how Quadriga had held money in the first place; I thought it was just a trade. Jennifer only knew that she was paid a commission to process payments for QuadrigaCX via a firm set up in her name. Cotten, it turned out, had transferred the funds into personal accounts on competitor exchanges. Midas Gold was an intermediary between Liberty Reserve and its traders, transferring cash into digital currency and back again, ensuring that no centralized record of clients existed. One of those bay islandsfour acres of pine encircled by black sandCotten purchased that summer. We all want Bitcoin to succeed, and businesses in the Bitcoin industry to succeed, which encourages some level of self-delusion. He neglected to disclose, however, that he filled those fake accounts with invented funds, trading counterfeit Bitcoin for real Bitcoin and Canadian and American dollars. On Dec.1, 2016, Nova Scotia's Royal Gazette announced she was changing her name from Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Griffith to her current name, Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Robertson. Josh Marcus reports on the life and lies of the 'Bitcoin Widow' Thursday 14. Jennifer Robertson told CBC's The National she knew nothing of the widespread fraud her husband had committed. And I'll carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life," she said. Still, the eulogies had a prismatic quality; viewed from an angle they suggested darker possibilities. Then, in December, Robertson called Sunnybrook to explain that Gerry, while on their honeymoon in Jaipur, had died suddenly. The yacht salesman had questions, though it was not his job to ask questions. They were excited. A year later, Canadas largest exchange, CaVirTex, announced its closure, also blaming hackers; the second-largest exchange, Vault of Satoshi, closed the same week. 2023 Cond Nast. The Instagram account belonging to Jennifer Robertson showed that since 2016 shed taken trips to Macchu Pichu, Dubai, Oman, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Rio de Janeiro, often in private jets. The operator of an exchange on which Cotten opened accounts told Ernst & Young that Cotten had squandered most of his holdings on reckless trades. Gerald Cotten: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know | Heavy.com In some exits, the operator simply vanishes with the funds. Quadrigas corporate accounts did trade tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin with accounts connected to known Ponzi schemes and illegal marketplaces. In January 2014 Salkeld posted a video on YouTube in which Cotten gently teaches his young daughters how to operate the Bitcoin ATM; Salkeld is certain that his two-year-old is the youngest person ever to have purchased Bitcoin. Within hours of the announcement of Cottens death, a crowdsourced, scrupulously documented investigation, applying the logic and methodology of the blockchain, was afoot. He was driven to a private hospital and diagnosed with acute gastroenteritis. It looked hollow.. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange, and had to be funded by sending a bank wire to Japan. In the fall of 2016, Bitcoin began its wild rise. He also accepted cash deposits. Im Mike. | Pikagi There were further questions regarding Jennifer changing her name from Griffith to Forgeron and then to Robertson. She was allowed to keep $90,000 in cash, $20,000 in retirement savings, a 2015 Jeep Cherokee, $15,000 in furniture and some jewelry, including her wedding band. The most successful of these was Midas Gold, incorporated in early 2008. It put us in a particular place of need.. He saw himself as an enforcerof rules, of integrity, of loyalty. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. The broad outlines of his story were blandly conventional, at least if you subtracted his interest in decentralized monetary systems. If Quadriga was conceived as a scam, what kind of scam was it? All rights reserved. The court-appointed monitor, Ernst & Young, employed cryptocurrency experts but was roundly ridiculed for a string of blunders that began when, shortly after seizing control of Quadrigas remaining funds, approximately $1 million was inadvertently transferred to one of the accounts that Cottens death rendered inaccessible. His clients were locked out of about $250 million, and investigators later found widespread fraud. What really happened to Gerald Cotten, Netflix's Crypto King? The body was returned to the Oberoi and then sent out again to be embalmed; the embalmer refused to accept a body from a hotel, so Oberoi employees took it to a local medical college, where a staffer performed the procedure. 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. He was a founder and the CEO of Quadriga, Canadas dominant Bitcoin exchangesomething like TD Ameritrade for cryptocurrency. Details Emerging On Death Of Crypto CEO Gerald Cotten: Report - NDTV Call it the Mastermind Theory. In India, Cotten remarked, the Canadian dollar went a long way. It looked hollow. Weinberg and several others who visited the office for Bitcoin meetups saw stacks of hundreds of payroll checks in the names of businesses that were not Quadriga, addressed to people who were not Quadriga employees. She lives in Halifax. Traditional law enforcement, meanwhile, had only the vaguest understanding of the subject. Overnight, Quadriga became Canadas dominant Bitcoin marketplace. gerald cotten belize Investing with Quadriga was even patriotic: People like the fact were located in Canada, Cotten told an interviewer, a point he often emphasized. Around this time, Patryn changed the slug that appeared beneath his TalkGold posts to: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Benjamin Franklin.. 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. Looking for more? As it turned out, Michael Patrynas Michael Perklin and nearly everyone in the close-knit Canadian cryptocurrency community had known for yearswas not really Michael Patryn. Robertson maintains she knew little about the company's inner workings, and largely did as she was told. Essentially, Gerry gambled away customer money through trading. It was a gentle, unflappable smile. He might be living on a private island, or in Hong Kong, Thailand, or Monaco, traveling by yacht and helicopter and private jet. In the public narrative that emerged, derived largely from a meticulously detailed investigation by Canadas Globe and Mail, Cotten fell sick nine days into his Indian honeymoon, shortly after checking into the Oberoi Rajvilas in Jaipur on December 8, 2018. J ennifer Robertson was widowed when Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, died suddenly in India in December, leaving behind a business in chaos and as much as $180 million of cryptocurrency. Cottens reputation as a cryptocurrency true believer survived his death on December 9, 2018. "Some people think Gerald is still alive,somewherehe'sat the beach, sipping a Mai Tai;he's benefiting from all of the millions that were stolen from investors.
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