Contents
When she followed up the claims with Cotten, the conman explained that Quadriga was unable to process all the withdrawal requests because the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce had frozen $26 million. A class hallmark of exit scams is to obfuscate and deflect blame on to someone else. He lived the high life with his soon to be wife, Jennifer Robertson that included exotic vacations around the world.
Cotten’s death, and the loss of his keys, has been offered as a cautionary tale, when other instances of crypto-currency loss have come to light. Gerald Cotten, and his wife, Jennifer Robertson, in India, shortly before his death.
Medical experts told The Globe and Mail that Cotten’s symptoms and rapid decline suggest he had a perforated bowel, which can cause extremely sudden death. But no autopsy was performed on Cotten’s body, so nobody can be sure why, exactly, he died — a fact that’s encouraged conspiracy theorists who believe that Robertson poisoned her husband or that he’s not dead at all. In December 2019, investors were clamoring for Cotten’s body to be exhumed in order to verify the cause of death. According to probate documents filed by Robertson, on December 21, 2018, he left her most of his personal assets of approximately 9.5 million CAD. His will included provision to set aside $100,000 for his in-laws, for the care of the couple’s two dogs, if Robertson should die within 30 days of his death. Cotten took the cautionary step of storing most of the $250 million cryptocurrency deposits Quadriga managed in so-called «cold wallets».
Cotten had written a new will in late November 2018, approximately two weeks before his death. His wife Jennifer Robertson, accompanied Cotten to the hospital on December 8, 2018, when he experienced a crisis in his ongoing battle with Crohn’s disease. In spite of the hospital’s efforts, he went through a septic shock and had several cardiac arrests, dying, finally, on December 9, 2018. The company kept his death secret for a month before announcing it and later declared bankruptcy after Cotten’s wife, Jennifer Robertson, revealed her late husband was the only person who had the passwords needed to access investors’ funds.
” replied the yacht salesman, in the delicate manner of his trade. A yacht salesman never asked what customers were “looking to spend,” or whether they had ever been on a yacht, let alone knew how to operate one. He summoned a future in which the customer was already a proud captain astride a luxury pleasure vessel dividing a turquoise sea. “I had no direct knowledge of how Gerry operated the business prior to his death, and was not aware of his improper actions,” she said through a statement to CBC. In addition, he owned a single-engine airplane and a Lexus. The article described a glamorous life by a couple who “traveled constantly,” but also wanted to sponsor a home for orphans in India.
Video: Sports teams, personalities pour in support for Bills’ Damar Hamlin
The chat is also frequented by journalists, detectives from the FBI and RCMP, and several of the targets of the ongoing criminal investigations, including Patryn, whose exact whereabouts have been unknown for about a year. In his comments—both in the group chat and in a private chat—he has minimized his involvement in Quadriga and declines to speak in detail about his past. But it was his past that, early on, became the focus of the Quadriga investigation.
When the person from the hotel had no further information, Dr. Mehra turned him down, telling him to go instead to the SMS Medical College, a state institution. At public embalming operations, police are often present, she said. But she works at a private hospital, away from police scrutiny, and has developed a wariness over the bodies sent her way. She recounts an episode of a soldier who arrived covered in bruises – including on his toes – which she saw as evidence of torture.
Jennifer Robertson (Quadriga)
Under the Mastermind Theory, Cotten ran Quadriga much as he had S&S Investments and its successors, honoring enough withdrawal requests to maintain credibility. The plan, from the beginning, would be to keep the con going as long as possible before vanishing with the money. After Bitcoin collapsed—and the withdrawal complaints turned into lawsuits, negative press, and the threat of a formal investigation—Cotten got married, wrote a will, flew to India for his “honeymoon,” and disappeared. In 2014 Cotten spoke publicly of moving currencies between exchanges to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. It may be that he traded Quadriga’s funds in a frantic effort to recoup the losses he had sustained. 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.
Cotten provided withdrawals manually, seeming to give preference to the customers who complained loudest in public forums. He sent cash, in paper bags and shoeboxes, to coffee shops, laundromats, and pool halls. A year before his death he sent a colleague a photograph taken in the kitchen of his Kelowna home.
In the wake of his death, QuadrigaCX was unable to locate or secure a significant amount of cryptocurrency reserves. At the time of Cotten’s death, Quadriga CX owed its 76,000 investors approximately $137 million ($215 million CAD). The country’s biggest securities regulator ruled last year that Quadriga CX’s collapse was due to a Ponzi scheme operated by Cotten. The 33-page report also concluded Cotten had opened Quadriga accounts under aliases and credited himself with fictitious currency and crypto asset balances, which he then traded with unsuspecting Quadriga clients. Even Cotten’s former business partner, Michael Patryn, said he ‘didn’t believe that he died’ when he first read the news.
Gerald Cotten
The sham ran for three months before shutting down with investors’ money disappearing. In the early 2000s, he met Patryn, who was six years older and has a mysterious past. According to Vanity Fair, Patryn was arrested in Southern California, where he lived with his family, and pleaded guilty to conspiring to transfer stolen identity documents.
Online conspiracy theories have alleged that what is wolves of wall street might have faked his own death and taken the money. Gerald Cotten is a bitcoin millionaire from Canada whose death, supposedly from complications relating to Crohn’s disease, is now being questioned. Others accused his wife, Robertson of involvement in his death and/or disappearance, an accusation which pushed her to attempt to take her own life, she shared with The Globe and Mail.
- And the materials were insufficient – there was enough for walls and furnishings, but not enough to complete the roof, equip the kitchen or install interior doors.
- In an affidavit, Cotten’s widow said she has been subjected to online threats and ‘slanderous comments’, including claims that her husband is not dead.
- 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 yacht.
- When Cotten died, the platform owed approximately C$215 million to clients, according to the commission.
- 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.
Everyone on their tree-lined street pitches in for snow-removal services, and they take turns picking up each other’s mail. While it only costs about $50 a month to tie down a plane at Debert, Mr. Cotten was always behind on his invoices. She said he did not fly his plane at all during her time as manager. On Dec. 13, Mr. Cotten’s death was registered with the Government of Rajasthan Directorate of Economics and Statistics, which works out of a cramped ground-floor office on a busy street stacked high with colourful paper files.
Online Rumors Claim It’s Possible That Cotten Faked His Own Death
Friends say he spoke of an emotionally absent father, manipulative family members, his obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He ranted about his hatred of scam artists, though his definition of the term seemed rather idiosyncratic—identity theft was a clean, bloodless business, but when you lied to someone’s face, it was unforgivable. He saw https://cryptolisting.org/ himself as an enforcer—of rules, of integrity, of loyalty. 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. The major break in the investigation was not a revelation, exactly, but something that had been hiding in plain sight.
Jennifer Robertson, the widow of QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten, will be allowed to keep more than $90,000 cash and a Jeep Cherokee in a settlement agreement with the company’s bankruptcy trustee. Earlier this year, the court issued a so-called asset preservation order to prevent Robertson from selling about $12 million in assets belonging to her or Cotten’s estate. Those assets include properties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, a small aircraft, “luxury vehicles,” a sailboat, investments, cash and gold and silver coins. Jennifer, also known as the QuadrigaCX widow, has roughly 7.5 million Canadian dollars in real estate property.
A report by Cotten’s attending physician, Dr Jayant Sharma, revealed that he suffered from Crohn’s disease, a chronic ailment that causes inflammation of the digestive tract. His wife later told a court affidavit that Cotten had been diagnosed with the disease when he was 24. Robertson and Gerald Cotten were in a relationship for several years, prior to their October 2018 marriage.
He was then admitted to a hospital for “symptoms of acute gastroenteritis.” He had vomited 10 times and had a background of Crohn’s disease. He spent the night in the hospital but then deteriorated suddenly. The report confirms that, after Cotten died, he essentially took the passwords to millions of dollars with him. 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.
Just months before his death, his parents were excitedly heading off to Scotland for a celebration of their son’s wedding, one said. He had an air of being successful, but he wasn’t flashy, said the neighbours, all of whom declined to be named out of respect for the grieving family. Signs of Mr. Cotten’s wealth occasionally appeared as well at his childhood home in Belleville, a Southern Ontario city of 50,000 located at the mouth of the Moira River. His parents, Bruce and Cheryl, ran Quinte Antiques there and live in a large brick house with blue siding and arched windows and doorways.
In the weeks since Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp. belatedly made his death public, the exchange’s furious users have raised questions about what happened, why Mr. Cotten was in India – and even whether he was actually dead. After beginning as an entrepreneur, Cotten founded Quadriga Fintech Solutions in 2013 and the company evolved to become the largest crypto exchange in the country, and it even helped to legitimize Bitcoin. Gerald Cotten, who was the 30-year-old founder of cryptocurrency trading platform Quadriga CX, died while he was on his honeymoon in India in 2018. He purchased a $600,000 sailboat, a brand new Cessna aircraft, and amassed a real estate portfolio that included four primary residences, . He also purchased 14 rental properties in Nova Scotia, where he owned every house on a cul-de-sac. Cotten was an early cryptocurrency evangelist and part of a group that met in restaurants once a week called ‘the Vancouver Bitcoin Co-op.’ He believed that Bitcoin could change the world by challenging traditional forms of banking.
You can read a lengthy court document from a monitor that assessed the situation after Cotten’s death here. At one point, there were calls for Cotten’s grave to be exhumed for an autopsy to be performed on the body «to confirm both its identity and the cause of death». Some thought he was moving around, using different names whilst others suspected that if he was dead, he was either murdered or had taken his own life. His widow has stated she had no idea he was running a scam. Trust No One tells the shocking story of Gerald ‘Gerry’ Cotten, charting his rise to the top of Bitcoin and his dramatic fall, leaving his legacy tarnished. From hair trends to relationship advice, our daily newsletter has everything you need to sound like a person who’s on TikTok, even if you aren’t.