A couple of years after graduation, Cotten moved to Vancouver and joined a clubby community of entrepreneurs who had become enamored with Bitcoin. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Whats your goal? replied the yacht salesman, in the delicate manner of his trade. However, the couple never arrived at the house, and the honeymoon did not go as planned. Both men soon graduated, however. When S&S suspended operations three months later, taking most of its clients funds with it, Patryn took to TalkGold to defend Cottens integrity. Patryn joined TalkGold on April 3, 2003, the year the site launched. [3] Robertson's first marriage, to Jacob Forgernon, ended in divorcer. In the aftermath, Jennifer agreed to return $12 million from the estate as part of a settlement. The official cause of death was complications from Crohns disease, but the gastroenterologist who treated Cotten told the Globe and Mail that the death still haunted him. In this version of the story, scams beget scams and incompetence snowballs into recklessness and squander. And I'll carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life," she said. He had seemed to appear in Vancouver out of thin air. She believed in him. But it was his past that, early on, became the focus of the Quadriga investigation. Not least due to the fact that allegedly only Cotten knew the passwords to the cold wallets worth nearly $ 190 million. According to her, Gerry was in charge of the accounts by then. Gerald Cotten was a like a dream to . The first Bitcoin block was created on January 3, 2009, and the currency gained economic value on May 22, 2010, a date enshrined in Bitcoin lore as Pizza Day, when a Florida man paid someone in England 10,000 Bitcoins to order him two pizzas from Papa Johns. They traced the relationship back to 2003, to a dingy warren of a website called TalkGold. He was busy. Perhapsthis scenario goesCotten believed that the cryptocurrency bull market would continue indefinitely, leading to higher trading volumes and profits; Cotten would have forced Patryn out, knowing that with intensified public scrutiny, his past would become a liability. Be a smarter, safer investor in eight weeks. In the original account, Cotten fell sick nine days into his Indian honeymoon, shortly after checking into the Oberoi Rajvilas in Jaipur on December 8, 2018. Robertson said "everything was crazy" after Cotten died andher lawyers were the ones who decided to wait weeks before letting investors know about Cotten's death. Patryn would tell friends that theyd first met in a con artist meet-cute, like the thieves in an Ernst Lubitsch film who fall in love while picking each others pockets. It concerned Quadrigas cofounder. Its object was not to track down every lost Bitcoin but to maximize the pot of money that could be returned to Quadrigas creditors. He cleared trees and built a house, though he had no apparent plans to move in. 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. It was so hard to buy Bitcoin in Canada, says Cotten in his unflappably peppy, inquisitive voice, in a 2014 interview. Creditors began to ask questions online about the authenticity of the formal documents in a country notorious for the ease at which falsified documents can be purchased, particularly after they learned that the death certificate misspelled Cottens name, and that the former chairman and managing director of the company that ran the hospital had been convicted of financial fraud two months earlier. Crypto for Advisors What financial. Their companies websites often shared registration information and were operated by the same computers. Often Quadriga was the only Bitcoin company willing to pay for a sponsorship. He sought a programmer who is familiar with Bitcoin to develop a website that would serve as an open market place, like a stock market, where people buy and sell Bitcoin. The design had to be simple, but professional and it had to be built quickly. He was 30-years-old. Robertson said something Cotten said around the time they were drawing up the will didn't sit right with her. She was apologetic about people losing their money, saying, I would have never, ever stolen from other people. But within a month after Cottens reported death, blockchain investigators proved that nearly all of the inaccessible wallets were empty. So, if youre curious to find out more, weve got you covered. The brutal murders of four Idaho college students shocked millions. Barely more than 24 hours after the onset of a stomachache, he was pronounced dead. Friends say he spoke of an emotionally absent father, manipulative family members, his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He was always smiling, really friendly, offering stuff, says Alex Salkeld, a member of the original Vancouver Bitcoin circle. According to an investigation by Canada's Globe and Mail, Cotten. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canadas east coast. We all want Bitcoin to succeed, and businesses in the Bitcoin industry to succeed, which encourages some level of self-delusion. And the fact that he did what he did I carry his shame with me. 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. Its just completely out of their wheelhouse, says a Quadriga creditor and cryptocurrency expert who was interviewed after publishing his findings online under the moniker QCXINT. Gerald 'Gerry' Cotten founded Quadriga CX, which he dubbed Canada 's best Bitcoin exchange. Small said people were bringingduffel bags of cash to the home Cotten and Robertson shared. He was my best friend. It's a possibility that I was wearing rose-coloured glasses.". QuadrigaCX founder's widow owns $7.5M in Nova Scotia real estate | CBC News Loaded. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. Call it the Mastermind Theory. He used to say he didnt open up to many people, but he was able to open up to me.. Jennifer now lives in Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her two pet dogs. The couple traveled abroad constantly, and they planned to sponsor a home for 12 children at an orphanage in India. "I've already said it a million times now: I don't know.I'm tired of defending myself for something I didn't do.". 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. The Nova Scotia Supreme Court declared the company bankrupt and selected the accounting firm Ernst & Young to serve as its third-party monitor, responsible for securing the lost funds belonging to Quadrigas creditors. The broad outlines of his story were blandly conventional, at least if you subtracted his interest in decentralized monetary systems. Cotten, 26 at the time, said he worked in bitcoin. There were rumors of other employees taking similar trips. Using Cotten's money, Robertsonstarted her own real estate company andmanagedmore than a dozen properties. At the time, Gerry ran QuadrigaCX and profited from Bitcoins astronomical rise in value. By the time of his death, Cottens sham trading accountswhich had names like Aretwo Deetwo and Seethree Peaohhhad conducted approximately 300,000 trades. Robertson had already been briefly married. It'd be a form of closure for some people," said Small. Cotten amassed millions from setting up what was once Canada's biggest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, and lived a lavish lifestyle After his mysterious death during his honeymoon with wife. We didnt want to cast doubt on our own scene. Among those Mueller warned was Amber Scott, an anti-money-laundering expert at a compliance firm in Toronto called Outlier Solutions. Furthermore, Gerry signed his will less than two weeks before his death, leaving all of his assets to Jennifer. The couple's relationship began in 2014 when Robertsonswiped right on Cotten's Tinder profile. He claimed he wrote his passwords on paper and locked them in a safe deposit box at a bank, because thats the best way to keep coins secure. Shortly before his death, according to two Quadriga associates, Cotten told close friends and family that Quadriga had a dead mans switch that would send them access to the exchanges funds in the case of his disappearance or death. The Seaglass Trustbecame the mortgage holder on all properties owned by Robertson Nova Property Management on Jan. 25. Some of the early visitors to the Vancouver Quadriga office even thought the exchange was just a show. 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. Regarding speculation that he was still alive, Jennifer said, I saw Gerry die; I was holding his hand when he passed away. The following year it launched a bid to be listed on the Canadian stock exchange, submitting to a full financial audit. Jennifer Robertson was widowed whenCotten, the founder ofQuadrigaCX, died suddenly in India in December, leaving behind a business in chaos and as much as $180 million of cryptocurrency locked in his encrypted laptop and USB keys. All of it looked bad, but there was no confession of criminality. Quadriga raised nearly C$850,000 in private capital, but Cotten ultimately abandoned the effort after a dispute with one of the major investors. It was then revealed that Gerry presumably happened to be the only person with access to the digital keys to the cold wallets that held the cryptocurrency. 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. Gerry appeared to have taken full control, says Andrew Wagner. On their honeymoon in India, they intended to visit Robertson and Gerald Cotten House in Jaipur. Cotten was a quick study. Gerry was a very careful person who well understood the need to back up ones private keys. It didn't take long for the withdrawals to become greater than Quadriga's profits. 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. Cotten had declined to solicit Perklins services for Quadriga, but they worked beside each other at Decentral Toronto, a blockchain company that leased office space and served as the hub of the Toronto Bitcoin scene. In its registration documents, Midas Gold listed as its contact gerald.cotten@gmail.com. In one of his first posts he boasted of earning 30 percent monthly returns in HYIP investments. In December 2018, Cotten died during his honeymoon with his wife, Jennifer Robertson, in Jaipur, India. Still Cotten was not directly responsible for all of his troubles. Nova Scotia's property registry shows Robertson, her husbandand her company bought 16 properties between May 2016 and October 2018, ranging in price from $94,000for a waterfront lot in Lunenburg County to $2.5 million for nine row houses in Bedford. Soon they were responding to each others public posts with inside jokes. On one particular margin account, he conducted 67,000 individual trades alone, placing enormous bets on fledgling currencies like Dogecoin, OmiseGO, and Zcash. And exhuming the body would be a really huge step. Castor said Cotten operated Quadriga like a Ponzi scheme. 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. Perhaps Cottens obsessive foreign travelhe boasted of having visited more than 50 countries without ever having been searched by customswas inspired not by wanderlust but by strategy. 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 . According to Quadrigas last public filings in 2015, it operated in a deficit. 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. He summoned a future in which the customer was already a proud captain astride a luxury pleasure vessel dividing a turquoise sea. 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. Canadian Press. Apart from that, Jennifer is studying to become an elementary school teacher and hopes to graduate soon. There were limits, furthermore, to the scope of the monitors investigation. Netflix's latest true crime doc, "Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King", seeks to unravel the mystery of Gerald Cotten, the CEO of crypto exchange QuadrigaCX, who died in 2018. The year after Robertson met Cotten, the value of cryptocurrency plummeted. The couples marriage came around when Bitcoins value began to plummet, leading to customers wanting to withdraw their money from QuadrigaCX. The sudden death of Gerald Cotten in December 2018 plunged the world of cryptocurrency into chaos. Crypto for Advisors What financial. The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. The widow of cryptocurrency exchange founder Gerald Cotten, as well as a company registered in her name, own$7.5 million of Nova Scotia real estate that was purchased in the past 2years. Government records also reveal that Robertson has used three family names. When it came to the case of the missing Quadriga millions, however, the balance was reversed. Robertson owns two other properties in her own name, including an island in Mahone Bay the couple purchased in September 2017 from Fox News personality Tucker Carlsonfor $161,250 well below the island's tax-assessed value of $349,400. Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem. He would have new names and passports, perhaps a new face. "He also mentioned that the business would die without him," she said. Within months, things went from bad to worse for everyone involved. He also created dozens of false trading accounts to stimulate trading volume on the platforma fact he even disclosed in the 2015 filings. You couldnt hook up your bank account to anywhere. There is yet another possibility, one that none of the cases investigators is willing to discount. The delay tactic is more successful than might be expected, since customers of HYIPs understand, on some fundamental level, that promises of outsized returns are too good to be true; besides, there was always another outrageous bargain a few clicks away. Sure, he said. 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. 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. 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. This summer day, however, he was dead serious. The operator of an exchange on which Cotten opened accounts told Ernst & Young that Cotten had squandered most of his holdings on reckless trades. Cotten rarely brought up his work, but details emerged. Newsweek Newsletter sign-up > They married four years later in October 2018, living a. But he never did. 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. GROWING PAINS It promised within 48 hours (usually within 18) a return of 103% to 150%, possibly more. In its prospectus, Cotten wrote: Im afraid Im not going to fill this section of the page with the usual bumph about how your returns are made. Essentially, Gerry gambled away customer money through trading. Cotten's company, QuadrigaCX, expanded exponentially, and the twentysomethings soon became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Then, in December, Robertson called Sunnybrook to explain that Gerry, while on their honeymoon in Jaipur, had died suddenly. 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. Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to exit a society gone haywire. There were further questions regarding Jennifer changing her name from Griffith to Forgeron and then to Robertson. In his commentsboth in the group chat and in a private chathe has minimized his involvement in Quadriga and declines to speak in detail about his past. 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. They were excited. 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. The series delved into the plight of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The yacht salesman had questions, though it was not his job to ask questions. And Ill carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life.. Within hours of the announcement of Cottens death, a crowdsourced, scrupulously documented investigation, applying the logic and methodology of the blockchain, was afoot. When you invest with Quadriga, you remain in control.. "Whenever people put their money into the exchange, he sort of used it as his personal slush fund," she said. The couple lived in a three-bedroom in Fall River, north of Halifax, a rich suburb only recently carved out of a forest near a long dark lake; Cotten owned a third home in Kelowna, in British Columbias wine country; a fourth in Calgary; and 14 rental properties in Nova Scotia, including, in Bedford, every house on a dead-end street. There were also the Lexus and the zippy single-engine airplane, a Cessna 400, which hed never tried to fly. In some exits, the operator simply vanishes with the funds. He seemed to prefer acquaintances over friends. After hearing that Patryn had been bragging all over Vancouver about his talent for laundering money, Mueller unearthed the connection to Dhanani. Asked for his location, Patryn said he was traveling between Thailand and Hong Kong. "Everything that I knew about Gerry seems to have been a lie. Im going to build a Bitcoin exchange. In the fall of 2016, Bitcoin began its wild rise. He might still be collaborating with Patryn, or Patryn might be trying to track him down in a final act of Con vs. Con. The smiling boy stood out. Was Quadriga built to last, in other words, or built to self-destruct? The exchange took a cut of every transaction. 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. Canadian real estate developer Jennifer Robertson met Quadriga CEO Gerald Cotten on Tinder in 2014. His death left investors locked out of their money and left Jennifer Robertson, Gerrys wife, to deal with the fallout. As Quadriga customers tried to pull their money from the exchange, they were met with long waits to access their funds. But users claimed they received deposits from Jennifer directly, seemingly contradicting her statement. Jennifer Robertson became the focus of a lot of suspicious chatter online after her husband died and his company collapsed, exposing a $200-million fraud. This would have been a startling about-face; in the early days, those who knew them believed that the company belonged to Patryn, with Cotten serving as a front man. Before doctors could stabilize him, his heart stopped; he was revived, and his heart stopped again. She appeared with him, and even introduced him, at conferences. We are not sure about the diagnosis, he said. From our perspective, we needed Quadriga, says Andrew Wagner, who at the time was the co-ops director of public relations. Gerald Cotten's widow, Jennifer Robertson, said he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at the age of 24, about a year after he co-founded QuadrigaCX with his partner Mike Patryn. Or Michael from Italy. Quadrigas corporate accounts did trade tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin with accounts connected to known Ponzi schemes and illegal marketplaces. 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 wasnt intended as a compliment. On the. 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. She said she wants to move on with her life and hopes her new book, BitCoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions, is the final chapter of the Quadrigascandal. 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. His name was Gerald Cotten, and he went by Gerry; his girlfriend was a property manager named Jennifer Robertson, or Jen; her two Chihuahuas, who liked to sun themselves on the deck as the Gulliver negotiated the islands and shoals of Mahone Bay, were Nitro and Gully. He befriended Cotten in 2016 in Toronto, where Cotten had moved during the effort to take Quadriga public. In the months that followed,investigatorsuncovered that Cotten had been moving money from the exchange into his personal accountsand engaging in other suspicious behaviour. Patryn, though six years older than Cotten, was only 21. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. During that time Quadriga continued to accept new funds but returned none. All I will say is that we will generate your return and that we are not what is called a ponzi or pyramid scheme.. Over several dozen hours of sailing lessons, the yacht dealer learned a few things about his customer. If you lose the private key to your cryptocurrency walleta long, randomly generated password, all but impossible to memorizeyour funds are gone forever. Id like a boat that I can cruise locally, said the smiling boy, and then take south. He wanted to reach the Caribbean without having to stop in Canada or the United States. I love electric. The whole thing would cost $600,000, but expense never came uponly safety. Early on, Robertson was also processing funds acting as a funnel for customer money on behalf of QuadrigaCX. Because Canadian banks wanted nothing to do with Bitcoin, users had to transfer funds through a series of intermediaries, bleeding transaction fees. But when she met Cotten at the Toronto Bitcoin hub Decentral, she found him funny and sweet. He seemed lonely. A death in Cryptoland: The story of Gerald Cotten and QuadrigaCX, Quadriga CEO's widow on his death, the missing crypto millions and what she did and didnt know. It put us in a particular place of need.. Cottens reputation as a cryptocurrency true believer survived his death on December 9, 2018. He rejected Quadrigas application and forwarded his investigation to contacts in law enforcement. Two other properties, including Cotten and Robertson's home in Fall River, have been transferred to the Seaglass Trust, which lists Robertson as a trustee. The same blind faith that attracts the marks also drives them away.
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