In October 2004, TalkGold members began to debate whether Patryn might in fact be Omar Dhanani, one of 28 suspects who had been arrested by the U.S. Secret Service in a global sting operation targeting an online marketplace for stolen credit card information and forged documents. 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. Other red flags raised by investors surrounding Cotten's death included his name being spelled incorrectly on the death certificate and his closed casket funeral. A year before his death he sent a colleague a photograph taken in the kitchen of his Kelowna home. 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. 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. Or perhaps Quadriga was to resemble Cotten and Patryns previous collaboration, Midas Golda service that enabled money laundering, taking percentages of each transaction. I was one of five nonwhites working in capital markets in Vancouver.) Patryn shortly resumed posting on TalkGold and other HYIP forums and opened a series of businesses that brokered digital currencies. All I will say is that we will generate your return and that we are not what is called a ponzi or pyramid scheme.. "I did let that go to the lawyers and the contractors, and I trusted that they knew what to do," she said. Overnight, Quadriga became Canadas dominant Bitcoin marketplace. This was the detail that most shocked cryptocurrency professionals. There were forums promoting promising new HYIPs; scam warnings; advice on creating ones own Ponzi, or how to get out early enough to profit; and offers of payment to boost fraudulent schemes on the site. Nine days later Cotten is believed to have died due. There is yet another possibility, one that none of the cases investigators is willing to discount. 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. But just about every cryptocurrency expert in Canada had a Quadriga account. The media dragged Gerald Cotten's wife, Jennifer Robertson, into the spotlight after his mysterious death. "Everything that I knew about Gerry seems to have been a lie. 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. 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 . The operator of an exchange on which Cotten opened accounts told Ernst & Young that Cotten had squandered most of his holdings on reckless trades. 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. (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. What if the furious trading on other exchanges near the end of his life was not careless but calculated? On one particular margin account, he conducted 67,000 individual trades alone, placing enormous bets on fledgling currencies like Dogecoin, OmiseGO, and Zcash. The couple traveled abroad constantly, and they planned to sponsor a home for 12 children at an orphanage in India. Cotten ran his own succession of schemes throughout those years, during which he also attended an undergraduate honors program at York Universitys Schulich School of Business. He also accepted cash deposits. In December 2018, Jennifer and Gerry traveled to Jaipur, India, for their honeymoon. They wanted answers. Amidturmoil in the cryptocurrency market, Cotten and Robertson got married and decided to travel to Jaipur, India, for their honeymoon. She has co-authored a book titled Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions that details her experiences with Gerry. 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. 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. ^ "Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing crypto millions". In November 2013 Cotten and an older business partner, Michael Patryn, an authority on currency trading with passions for Brazilian jujitsu and luxury automobiles, incorporated the Quadriga coin exchange, or QuadrigaCX (named, for reasons that were not immediately clear, after the horse-drawn chariots of the Roman Empire). Inside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushners Gilded Florida ParadiseFar From Donald Trump or 2024, Chaos lingers at the periphery, but the Trump-Kushner marriage is thriving in exile. The little brother under the thumb finally grew some balls. A quadriga is a chariot yoked to four horses abreast. In the fall of 2016, Bitcoin began its wild rise. Robertson said while she isn'tfirmly against the idea of an exhumation, shewas withCotten when he died. Retrieved 18 January 2022. Gerald Cotten didn't just cause investors to lose millions he deceived his wife, Jennifer Robertson for years. When Patryn told a stupid joke that nobody found funny, Cotten would burst into wild laughter. But it was his past that, early on, became the focus of the Quadriga investigation. 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. "I would have never, ever stolen from other people. She believed in him. The broad outlines of his story were blandly conventional, at least if you subtracted his interest in decentralized monetary systems. 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. Roberston said she's sorry for Cotten's actions and the harm he's caused. After his wife, Jennifer Robertson, announced his death on Facebook in January 2019, conspiracy theories quickly began circulating amongst Quadriga users who believed Cotten wasn't dead at. Nobody knew how to find the money. 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. One of those bay islandsfour acres of pine encircled by black sandCotten purchased that summer. On Facebook he posed with a tiger, a lion, behind the wheel of a Lamborghini, straddling an ATV in a desert. No autopsy was requested. He ran the business from his MacBook Pro, which he always carried with him. Under the Mastermind Theory, Cotten ran Quadriga much as he had S&S Investments and its successors, honoring enough withdrawal requests to maintain credibility. 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. She wonders why Robertson didn't think to question what was going on. He had seemed to appear in Vancouver out of thin air. 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. He found the place in the attic where four holes had been drilled through the rafters. Cotten may be hoping Robertson will join him once all the investigations have concluded, or she may be just another one of his victims. The couples marriage came around when Bitcoins value began to plummet, leading to customers wanting to withdraw their money from QuadrigaCX. 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. Early on, Robertson was also processing funds acting as a funnel for customer money on behalf of QuadrigaCX. Often Quadriga was the only Bitcoin company willing to pay for a sponsorship. According to Quadrigas last public filings in 2015, it operated in a deficit. The strangely familiar nightmare of impeaching Trump Clues to the identity of Anonymous, who wrote the explosive White House op-ed Former Fox News staffers demand to be released from their NDAs Why crypto-crooks have their sights set on Iceland A sustained booing reveals Trumps true face From the archive: A portrait of Kim Jong Un, part man, part myth. Their companies websites often shared registration information and were operated by the same computers. As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. It was quickly very clear that he wasnt who he said he was. Wealth is freedom, read the prospectus. In this way Cotten could have stowed away a fortune in foreign bank accounts in preparation for a grand exit. "There [were]many things about Quadriga that I didn't understand.". Call it the Mastermind Theory. So, if youre curious to find out more, weve got you covered. The guy just always had a big goofy smile and laugh. | Pikagi And I did think that was odd.". 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. Gerald had a clean record, he could speak to the masses, while Michael operated the back end. (Patryn: I would say that the opposite is more accurate. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. While he lost thousands of dollars when Quadriga shut down, he said adding up the losses of friends and family to whom he had recommended the trading platform, the totalsits at more than $1 million. Every Bitcoin transaction appears in a public ledgerthe blockchainthat can be consulted by anybody with internet access. By that point, however, a new Gerald Cotten venture was already six months old. The will made no mention of the external hard drives, called cold wallets, in which Cotten had stored most of Quadrigas funds. TalkGold was a Ponzi clearinghouse, where blind faith and curdled cynicism engaged in a demonic rumba. It took more than a month for QuadrigaCX to publicly announce Cotten's death and then another two weeks for Jennifer Robertson to admit the customer funds were inaccessible." Michael MacDonald (2019-07-16). More than 75,000 Quadriga account holders also had questions. 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. Despite additional travailsa software glitch that lost C$14 million, a cease-trade order from the British Columbia Securities Commission after Cotten failed to file an audit, and CIBCs seizure of C$21 million from one of its payment processors after the bank failed to determine its rightful ownerQuadriga profited wildly from Bitcoins giddy rise. Still Cotten was not directly responsible for all of his troubles. In 2014 Cotten spoke publicly of moving currencies between exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. Gerald Cotten, a Nova Scotia resident originally from Ontario, was 30 years old when he died suddenly while travelling in India on Dec. 9 -- leaving his virtual company, QuadrigaCX, without access . According to her, Gerry was in charge of the accounts by then. Regarding speculation that he was still alive, Jennifer said, I saw Gerry die; I was holding his hand when he passed away. The year after Robertson met Cotten, the value of cryptocurrency plummeted. In December 2018, Cotten died during his honeymoon with his wife, Jennifer Robertson, in Jaipur, India. Gerald "Gerry" Cotten died in 2018, taking with him a password to access funds Photo credit: Netflix. The sudden death of Gerald Cotten in December 2018 plunged the world of cryptocurrency into chaos. When S&S suspended operations three months later, taking most of its clients funds with it, Patryn took to TalkGold to defend Cottens integrity. About 76,000 individuals held accounts on Quadriga, and some of the most technically sophisticated of them were out hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. "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.". When search suggestions are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. 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. Which meant that Cotten was not really who he said he was either. . 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. He was described as an ex-business partner who had met Cotten online over five years ago. He was like a ray of sunshine, Patryn told the interviewer. "I hadn't understood how Quadriga had held money in the first place;I thought it was just a trade," she said. Patryn, though six years older than Cotten, was only 21. The public bid was a last-ditch effort to salvage a flailing Ponzi, exploiting positive press and public sympathy to bilk money from investors. Everybody is a genius, said Albert Einstein, and every Redditor is an Einstein. There were further questions regarding Jennifer changing her name from Griffith to Forgeron and then to Robertson. He would have new names and passports, perhaps a new face. A podcast about the collapse of the crypto exchange Quadriga after the death of its founder in India. 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. And Ill carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life.. Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. She lives in Halifax. 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. 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. The same blind faith that attracts the marks also drives them away. The following afternoon Robertson returned with the body to Canada. Gerald Cotten, 30, was the CEO of QuadricaCX, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada which defaulted last year following his death while abroad with his wife Jennifer Robertson.. 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. On his personal YouTube channel (account name Gerryrulz) he had posted several dozen homemade videos as infantile as they were portentous: Gerry incinerating a $20 bill in his microwave; Gerry knocking over a Jenga tower with a giant teddy bear; Gerry stuck in an amusement park maze, repeating the same mistakes, unable to escape. His death left investors locked out of their money and left Jennifer Robertson, Gerry's wife, to deal with the fallout. 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. Patryn made people uncomfortable. 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. Cotten provided withdrawals manually, seeming to give preference to the customers who complained loudest in public forums. The global enforcement action we announce today is an important step toward reining in the Wild West of illicit internet banking, said Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bitcoin would enable more than two billion people who lacked access to banks to send and receive payment; it would offer stability to citizens of countries with chaotic currencies; it would eliminate all banking fees. Cotten, it turned out, had transferred the funds into personal accounts on competitor exchanges. Gerald Cottenwas just 30whenhedied in India in December 2018. "He also mentioned that the business would die without him," she said. Cotten himself warned of this danger during a 2014 interview. Cottens generosity helped to compensate for a social aloofness that, despite his implacable cheerfulness, prevented him from developing close relationships. Quadriga sponsored local Bitcoin conventions and educational events, investments of $500 or $1,000 that yielded incalculable goodwill. He seemed to prefer acquaintances over friends. They married in Scotland in October 2018. Best Known As Gerald Cotten's Wife Jennifer Robertson's Husband Died On Their Honeymoon Cotten's Death Had The Crypto World In A Frenzy Has Disappeared From The Limelight Gerald Cotten was the founder of QuadrigaCX, once Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange. 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. In its registration documents, Midas Gold listed as its contact gerald.cotten@gmail.com. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple youd less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. 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. Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King delves into the circumstances surrounding Gerrys death and what happened to the company after that. 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 Press. You couldnt hook up your bank account to anywhere. Their findings, though baroquely technical, could be distilled to a two-word conclusion: The initial portrait of Cotten that emerged in February 2018, once his death was announced through a Quadriga Facebook post, squared with the yacht salesmans impressions. You don'thave like Aaron Matthews [Quadriga's director of operations] or anybody that would be able tokeep the company on? Jennifer Robertson told CBC's The National she knew nothing of the widespread fraud her husband had committed. "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. Cotten flushed. See tweets of EXIT SCAM @exitscampod on Twitter. Eventually, an investigation revealed that Gerry had committed fraud using customer money. Since Cottens 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. They usually did the outreaching; nobody had reached out to them before. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canadas east coast. Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotten married in 2018. Sure, he 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. Eric Schletz, the pilot who brokered Cottens purchase of the Cessna 400, has described having seen Cotten walking through an airport with $50,000 in cash. In this version of the story, scams beget scams and incompetence snowballs into recklessness and squander. He loved to fly: planes, helicopters, drones. After Gerrys death became public, she maintained that the attorneys decided to hold off on announcing it earlier. 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. Castor said Cotten operated Quadriga like a Ponzi scheme. His demise was not announced until over a month after it happened. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. It was a terrible, terrible moment," she said. When search suggestions are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. 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. He was a founder and the CEO of Quadriga, Canadas dominant Bitcoin exchangesomething like TD Ameritrade for cryptocurrency. Most of the homes are in metro Halifax. Investing with Quadriga was even patriotic: People like the fact were located in Canada, Cotten told an interviewer, a point he often emphasized. In October, Robertson signed a settlement in the Quadriga bankruptcy case, agreeing to forfeit approximately C$12 million of assets to the creditor class. Furthermore, Gerry signed his will less than two weeks before his death, leaving all of his assets to Jennifer. Some of the early visitors to the Vancouver Quadriga office even thought the exchange was just a show. Was Quadriga built to last, in other words, or built to self-destruct? He rejected Quadrigas application and forwarded his investigation to contacts in law enforcement. Robertson maintains she knew little about the company's inner workings, and largely did as she was told. It was so hard to buy Bitcoin in Canada, says Cotten in his unflappably peppy, inquisitive voice, in a 2014 interview. 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. Robertson had already been briefly married. Unsolved crimes attract amateur detectives, who canvass the internet for clues. Soon they were responding to each others public posts with inside jokes. 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. Hi, he said. He was sturdy and muscular, with blackwork tattoos and a face that in repose seemed to glower. He might be living on a private island, or in Hong Kong, Thailand, or Monaco, traveling by yacht and helicopter and private jet. 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.
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