She wanted to sell the Gulliver. He was my best friend. It's a possibility that I was wearing rose-coloured glasses.". 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. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked questions so rudimentary that they shocked the experts they interviewed. It begins with a few findings that do not fit neatly into the Royal Fuckup narrative. Mueller didnt understand how a federal convict had been able to change his name, continue to operate, and escape charges. Gerry was a very careful person who well understood the need to back up ones private keys. It put us in a particular place of need.. All rights reserved. I spent a couple of hours on the phone explaining the basics to an RCMP investigator and came away feeling like hed be much more comfortable with a dead body, a loaded gun, and a trail of blood.. 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. More than 75,000 Quadriga account holders also had questions. "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.". His wife, Jennifer Robertson, said he promised to create a mechanism that would give her the passwords after his death. 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. 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. 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. It was so hard to buy Bitcoin in Canada, says Cotten in his unflappably peppy, inquisitive voice, in a 2014 interview. He was sturdy and muscular, with blackwork tattoos and a face that in repose seemed to glower. Some of the earliest findings by the Reddit sleuths were more prurient than incriminating. The exchange took a cut of every transaction. In October 2013, Cotten placed a job posting on an online forum, BlackHatWorld, that marketed frauds and stolen goods. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. Crypto for Advisors What financial. She was apologetic about people losing their money, saying, I would have never, ever stolen from other people. On the. In HYIP chat rooms, Cotten and Patryn defended each other against angry investors and posed as satisfied clients of each others various businesses; Patryns tended to be payment processors, Cottens were marginally more sophisticated iterations of S&S Investments. Gerald Cotten didn't just cause investors to lose millions he deceived his wife, Jennifer Robertson for years. She froze and said something about having to shampoo her cats. Cotten, it turned out, had transferred the funds into personal accounts on competitor exchanges. Government records also reveal that Robertson has used three family names. In his will, Cotten bequeathed"any interest I may own"in the company to his"spouse's mother Carol Terry, and her spouse, Thomas Beazley.". Cotten rarely brought up his work, but details emerged. Sometimes hed say he was Michael from Pakistan. When you walked in, it was a very front-y feeling, says Joseph Weinberg. It's not clear if the Nova Scotiaproperties will be caught up in the efforts byQuadriga'sclients to recoup their losses. He might be living on a private island, or in Hong Kong, Thailand, or Monaco, traveling by yacht and helicopter and private jet. One of those bay islandsfour acres of pine encircled by black sandCotten purchased that summer. The most successful of these was Midas Gold, incorporated in early 2008. 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 grew up in a large brick house on a quiet suburban street in Belleville, The Friendly City, a waterfront community between Toronto and Montreal best known for its cheddar cheese. Robertson and Cotten met on a Tinder date in 2014, when they were both around 26 years old. He would have new names and passports, perhaps a new face. By that point, however, a new Gerald Cotten venture was already six months old. (Patryn, Jennifer Robertson, and at least a couple of other Quadriga contractors each operated their own payment processing firmsa significant conflict of interest, though not illegal.) He credited fake Quadriga accounts with fake funds but made actual trades by betting on cryptocurrency value. Then he flew to India, where things managed to get even worse. Which meant that Cotten was not really who he said he was either. 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. The smiling boy stood out. The guy just always had a big goofy smile and laugh. At the time, Gerry ran QuadrigaCX and profited from Bitcoins astronomical rise in value. 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. Robertson said something Cotten said around the time they were drawing up the will didn't sit right with her. He never mentioned Patryn in her presence again. He summoned a future in which the customer was already a proud captain astride a luxury pleasure vessel dividing a turquoise sea. [4] In her memoir, Bitcoin Widow: Love . He ranted about his hatred of scam artists, though his definition of the term seemed rather idiosyncraticidentity theft was a clean, bloodless business, but when you lied to someones face, it was unforgivable. You don'thave like Aaron Matthews [Quadriga's director of operations] or anybody that would be able tokeep the company on? But he never did. 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.. In 2010 he graduated with a bachelors degree in business administration from an honors program at York Universitys Schulich School of Business in Toronto. Quadriga installed a Bitcoin ATM in its office, the second of its kind in Canada, and accepted gold by the ounce, which could be dropped off in person. Zou placed C$500,000 (305,000) in trust in Quadriga CX, Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Wealth is freedom, read the prospectus. In some exits, the operator simply vanishes with the funds. But it was not easy to buy or sell if you lacked technological sophistication and considerable patience. 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. Eventually, an investigation revealed that Gerry had committed fraud using customer money. Patryn made people uncomfortable. Sometimes hed introduce himself as Michael from India. In a statement released by her lawyer, she said she had no knowledge of Cottens improper business practices and was upset and disappointed when she learned of them through the investigation. 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. She lives in Halifax. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange, and had to be funded by sending a bank wire to Japan. Be a smarter, safer investor in eight weeks. When he did file, he claimed no income from Quadriga. He had to resort to increasingly questionable practices in a desperate effort to salvage his dream. After learning of his death, one of his contractors immediately went to the house and searched for it. But users claimed they received deposits from Jennifer directly, seemingly contradicting her statement. Cotten's company, QuadrigaCX, expanded exponentially, and the twentysomethings soon became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Hi, he said. Or perhaps Quadriga was to resemble Cotten and Patryns previous collaboration, Midas Golda service that enabled money laundering, taking percentages of each transaction. Then, in December, Robertson called Sunnybrook to explain that Gerry, while on their honeymoon in Jaipur, had died suddenly. A podcast about the collapse of the crypto exchange Quadriga after the death of its founder in India. Jennifer Robertson, the widow of QuadrigaCX founder Gerald (Gerry) Cotten, will be allowed to keep more than $90,000 cash and a Jeep Cherokee in a settlement agreement with the company's. No autopsy was requested. 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. 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. 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. Before doctors could stabilize him, his heart stopped; he was revived, and his heart stopped again. Hes what youd call, says Mueller, a real motherfucker.. This summer day, however, he was dead serious. | Pikagi 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. He seemed like the kind of guy who might retire early to an island somewhere. He was always smiling, really friendly, offering stuff, says Alex Salkeld, a member of the original Vancouver Bitcoin circle. But on December 9, 2018, Gerry died at a local hospital because of complications resulting from Crohns disease at the age of 30. 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. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. (At press time those pizzas would be valued at $82,373,500.) A month passed before Robertson announced on Quadrigas Facebook page that Cotten had died. Among those Mueller warned was Amber Scott, an anti-money-laundering expert at a compliance firm in Toronto called Outlier Solutions. Twelve properties are currently held by Robertson Nova Property Management Ltd., a company registered toRobertson's home address. They wanted revenge. ^ "Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing crypto millions". Cotten provided withdrawals manually, seeming to give preference to the customers who complained loudest in public forums. Most people, a year after his death, already have. After his death, investigators discovered he used the money as his own personal slush fund. Nine days later Cotten is believed to have died due. And exhuming the body would be a really huge step. It is theoretically possible to conduct high-volume trades in such a way as to launder funds, provided that the trades are exotic enough to ensure that the losses accrue to another account that Cotten, or an associate, controls. 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. Regarding speculation that he was still alive, Jennifer said, I saw Gerry die; I was holding his hand when he passed away. As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. He might even be eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. 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. 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. "I would have never, ever stolen from other people. The couples marriage came around when Bitcoins value began to plummet, leading to customers wanting to withdraw their money from QuadrigaCX. 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. Cotten's com." The Walrus on Instagram: "Jennifer Robertson met her husband, Bitcoin entrepreneur Gerald Cotten, on Tinder. It took some time for him to grow on her, but they eventually fell in love. He ran the business from his MacBook Pro, which he always carried with him. If you lose the private key to your cryptocurrency walleta long, randomly generated password, all but impossible to memorizeyour funds are gone forever. At least some of those accounts had also been emptied. He seemed lonely. And I did think that was odd.". Gerald Cotten was a like a dream to . They struck the yacht salesman as a couple youd less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. Robertson said she trusted Cotten, and anyquestions were explained away because banks were very "anti-bitcoin" and there were problems exchanging cryptocurrency for cash through traditional means. 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. . "It has been the most unbelievable pain that I could ever imagine," she said. On their honeymoon in India, they intended to visit Robertson and Gerald Cotten House in Jaipur. The couple's relationship began in 2014 when Robertsonswiped right on Cotten's Tinder profile. The most effective and thorough investigation to date, however, has been conducted by anonymous accounts posting on Twitter, Reddit, Pastebin, and Telegram. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. It wasnt his first rodeo. (Patryn denies saying that he came from other countries: Im not nationalistic.). Quadriga raised nearly C$850,000 in private capital, but Cotten ultimately abandoned the effort after a dispute with one of the major investors. One day he showed up with Cotten, who behaved like a runt little brother but, as one friend put it, in a gross kind of waysycophantic, almost submissive. If you blur your eyes, this narrativeGerry Tries to Make Goodnearly coheres. 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. Pitbull is a pal, Carbone is for dinner, and, The Idaho Murders, Part 1: How 4 College Kids Lived and Loved. 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. But when the banks, the law, and the forces of Reddit tried to track down the cash, it turned out the young mogul may not have been who he purported to be. 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 had Crohns disease and seemed to subsist on hummus; when others drank beer, he produced bottles of hard cider. He would count on most people to forget all about him. Looking for more? The operator of an exchange on which Cotten opened accounts told Ernst & Young that Cotten had squandered most of his holdings on reckless trades. "I just really hated the questions, like, it seemed that I should have known," Robertson told CBC's Andrew Chang. It was not built, in its early days, to make money. It was just such a challenge.. We now know that Cotten began, no later than 2015, to steal his clients funds. They were excited. 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. Theres no way that a man like Gerry, with all his knowledge and his mind-set, would leave it to chance. When Perklin read that Cotten was the only person with the passwords to the companys holdings and had made no contingency plan should he be unable to access them, whether because of incapacitation, kidnapping, or death, my jaw kept on dropping to the point where it couldnt have dropped anymore.. 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. Not least due to the fact that allegedly only Cotten knew the passwords to the cold wallets worth nearly $ 190 million. 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. . (For his part, Patryn says he hasnt seen any reason to think that [Cotten] is alive.). He used to say he didnt open up to many people, but he was able to open up to me.. They were an odd pair. 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. This was the detail that most shocked cryptocurrency professionals. There was also the C$21 million seized by CIBC and the software glitch, which cost Quadriga C$14 million overnight. She decided that his involvement might mean that Quadriga was legitimate after all. Essentially, Gerry gambled away customer money through trading. 2023 Cond Nast. "It never occurred to me [that he was breaking the law]," said Robertson. Gox abruptly suspended operations, claiming that hackers had stolen $473 million from customer accounts. His parents owned an antiques store; Cotten decided to go into crypto. Less than three months later, the Quadriga Fund was dead, and Quadriga CX went live. Most of the homes are in metro Halifax. But within a month after Cottens reported death, blockchain investigators proved that nearly all of the inaccessible wallets were empty. 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. 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. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Gerald 'Gerry' Cotten founded Quadriga CX, which he dubbed Canada 's best Bitcoin exchange. 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. Cotten knew the catchphrases and the talking points, but he seemed most interested in Bitcoins speculative possibilities. In the months that followed,investigatorsuncovered that Cotten had been moving money from the exchange into his personal accountsand engaging in other suspicious behaviour. If Gerry the Mastermind is alive, what is he doing? 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. 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. He might still be collaborating with Patryn, or Patryn might be trying to track him down in a final act of Con vs. Con. Was Quadriga built to last, in other words, or built to self-destruct? Cotten said he had a helicopter license and offered to take Salkeld on a ride. Gerry the Mastermind might think he will get away with it. After Michael Perklin met Cotten at a cryptocurrency meetup,they became friends and Perklinlater became an investor. Four desks in a weird room, no business operations going on. It didn't take long for the withdrawals to become greater than Quadriga's profits. From our perspective, we needed Quadriga, says Andrew Wagner, who at the time was the co-ops director of public relations. 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. We do not invest in stocks, bonds, shares, precious metals or antiques. The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. He figured that Dhanani had friends in the underworld and in federal law enforcement. Were excited, said Cotten at the time, to be able to provide an unparalleled level of transparency.. On Facebook he posed with a tiger, a lion, behind the wheel of a Lamborghini, straddling an ATV in a desert. 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. 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. He was careful and pragmatic. Another co-op member, Michael Yeung, rejecting the insinuation that Cotten had been out to make a quick buck, said he was in it for the long haul., In February the Canadian Broadcast Company interviewed Michael Patryn. It served as an independent payment processor for Liberty Reserve: a digital currency that was operated by an American in Costa Rica and used by drug cartels, human traffickers, child pornographers, and Ponzis to launder money. If Quadriga was conceived as a scam, what kind of scam was it? On one particular margin account, he conducted 67,000 individual trades alone, placing enormous bets on fledgling currencies like Dogecoin, OmiseGO, and Zcash. This is a question that the lead investigator for the FBIs cybercrime division, Jennifer Vander Veer, has posed to crypto experts. Cotten was a computer nerd who had entered the right business at the right time and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. 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. When offered an electric motor for the life raft, the smiling boy gestured to his Tesla in the marinas parking lot. The brutal murders of four Idaho college students shocked millions. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. The sudden death of Gerald Cotten in December 2018 plunged the world of cryptocurrency into chaos.
gerald cotten jennifer robertson