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. Robertson isn't under investigation and has never faced criminal charges. 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. (At press time those pizzas would be valued at $82,373,500.) 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. 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. Pitbull is a pal, Carbone is for dinner, and, The Idaho Murders, Part 1: How 4 College Kids Lived and Loved. (For months, Miller Thomson, the Bay Street law firm appointed to represent the class of creditors, received hundreds of emails a day inquiring about the lost funds, and answered such a constant barrage of phone callsheartbreakers about lost pensions and college savings, babies crying in the backgroundthat its lawyers could do little else.) 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. Mueller didnt understand how a federal convict had been able to change his name, continue to operate, and escape charges. Cotten died later that same year of complications from Crohn's disease, when the couple was on a honeymoon in India. 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. Bitcoin was founded on the principle that no individual or institution should be trusted. Where Is Gerald Cotten's Wife, Jennifer Robertson Now? - Ecelebritymirror Widow of Quadriga crypto founder Gerald Cotten says she had no idea about the $215-million scam In an exclusive interview, Jennifer Robertson speaks out publicly about her deceased husband,. 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. When it came to the case of the missing Quadriga millions, however, the balance was reversed. 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. 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. Canadian Press. Seventy percent of the global Bitcoin trade was conducted through Mt. 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. Jennifer Robertson, whose husband Gerald Cotten died aged 30 during their honeymoon in India in 2018, opened up about her ordeal in a new book, Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions. It begins with a few findings that do not fit neatly into the Royal Fuckup narrative. On Facebook he posed with a tiger, a lion, behind the wheel of a Lamborghini, straddling an ATV in a desert. After Cotten's death, she agreed to forfeit $12 million in assets that included vehicles and real estate. The brutal murders of four Idaho college students shocked millions. Cotten's com." The Walrus on Instagram: "Jennifer Robertson met her husband, Bitcoin entrepreneur Gerald Cotten, on Tinder. 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. Seasick marine biologist, turned journalist. Government records also reveal that Robertson has used three family names. Im Mike. The cautionary tales of fortunes lost because of misplaced private keys have the quality, in Bitcoin mythology, of the homilies delivered at religious gatherings. Needless to say, the fund's clients were thoroughly disappointed. At least some of those accounts had also been emptied. 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. 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.. Within months, things went from bad to worse for everyone involved. Settlement allows QuadrigaCX founder's widow to keep $90K in cash - CBC The RCMP, which has jurisdiction over the case, has thus far not done so. So, if youre curious to find out more, weve got you covered. "I would have never, ever stolen from other people. Asked for his location, Patryn said he was traveling between Thailand and Hong Kong. Small said exhuming the body would be one way to lay those theories to rest. He loved to fly: planes, helicopters, drones. The yacht salesman had questions, though it was not his job to ask questions. 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. She decided that his involvement might mean that Quadriga was legitimate after all. Gerald "Gerry" Cotten died in 2018, taking with him a password to access funds Photo credit: Netflix. Before doctors could stabilize him, his heart stopped; he was revived, and his heart stopped again. You couldnt hook up your bank account to anywhere. He had to resort to increasingly questionable practices in a desperate effort to salvage his dream. Nobody followed up with him. Cbc.ca. She was apologetic about people losing their money, saying, I would have never, ever stolen from other people. OFFICE SPACE 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. There was also the C$21 million seized by CIBC and the software glitch, which cost Quadriga C$14 million overnight. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. It put us in a particular place of need.. She appeared with him, and even introduced him, at conferences. One of those bay islandsfour acres of pine encircled by black sandCotten purchased that summer. Traditional law enforcement, meanwhile, had only the vaguest understanding of the subject. Cotten was a quick study. 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. Archived from the original on 2021-05-22. They wanted answers. The little brother under the thumb finally grew some balls. In this way Cotten could have stowed away a fortune in foreign bank accounts in preparation for a grand exit. Far more likely is the narrative of Gerry the Royal Fuckup. 'The Crypto King': Who is Gerald Cotten and Where is Gerry Now? - Newsweek Four desks in a weird room, no business operations going on. The Walrus on Instagram: "Jennifer Robertson met her husband, Bitcoin Forensically examining Instagram accounts, interviews, and police reports, author Kathleen Hale reconstructs their relationship, and ultimately Petitos murder. Unsolved crimes attract amateur detectives, who canvass the internet for clues. Cotten said he had a helicopter license and offered to take Salkeld on a ride. But just about every cryptocurrency expert in Canada had a Quadriga account. Cottens generosity helped to compensate for a social aloofness that, despite his implacable cheerfulness, prevented him from developing close relationships. More than 75,000 Quadriga account holders also had questions. The major break in the investigation was not a revelation, exactly, but something that had been hiding in plain sight. 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. After learning of his death, one of his contractors immediately went to the house and searched for it. Matt Galloway talks to his widow, Jennifer Robertson, about what she did and didnt know. Within hours of the announcement of Cottens death, a crowdsourced, scrupulously documented investigation, applying the logic and methodology of the blockchain, was afoot. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple youd less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. Im going to build a Bitcoin exchange. A month passed before Robertson announced on Quadrigas Facebook page that Cotten had died. "And I remember asking him that in the car, like, 'What do you mean by that? From our perspective, we needed Quadriga, says Andrew Wagner, who at the time was the co-ops director of public relations. Who was the crypto king Gerry Cotten and what happened to him? 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. But he never did. . 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. On May 24, 2013, federal agents in 17 countries arrested Liberty Reserves administrators, shuttering its website and seizing its records and bank accounts. 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. "It has been the most unbelievable pain that I could ever imagine," she said. Patryn joined TalkGold on April 3, 2003, the year the site launched. It was the largest online money-laundering case in American history: Liberty Reserves 5.5 million user accounts had conducted 78 million transactions worth more than $8 billion. 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. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange, and had to be funded by sending a bank wire to Japan. The most successful of these was Midas Gold, incorporated in early 2008. After the public bid failed, he kept no internal recordsan almost inconceivable state of affairs for a company with an annual trading volume of more than $1 billion. Gerald Cotten - WikiAlpha 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. Sure, he said. 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. Retrieved 18 January 2022. In the months that followed,investigatorsuncovered that Cotten had been moving money from the exchange into his personal accountsand engaging in other suspicious behaviour. 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. Soon they were responding to each others public posts with inside jokes. Subsequently the brothers would gain Twitter notoriety for their incessant attacks on Donald Trump before they were shut down for operating fake accounts and purchasing followers.) He cleared trees and built a house, though he had no apparent plans to move in. And Ill carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life.. 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. He summoned a future in which the customer was already a proud captain astride a luxury pleasure vessel dividing a turquoise sea. They were excited. The series delved into the plight of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. Whats your goal? replied the yacht salesman, in the delicate manner of his trade. Jennifer met Gerry in November 2014 on Tinder. What Happened to Jennifer Robertson and Where Is Gerald Cotten's - MSN 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. After he squandered what remained in Quadrigas coffers, the price of Bitcoin plunged, and there was a run on the exchange. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canadas east coast. (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.) 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. The Protocol Exploring the tech behind crypto. He figured that Dhanani had friends in the underworld and in federal law enforcement. Gerald Cotten was a like a dream to . Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem. "It never occurred to me [that he was breaking the law]," said Robertson. "I just really hated the questions, like, it seemed that I should have known," Robertson told CBC's Andrew Chang. He was my best friend. It's a possibility that I was wearing rose-coloured glasses.". She has co-authored a book titled Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions that details her experiences with Gerry. He began to host the weekly meetups at Quadrigas office. She left behind a dozen teddy bears they had planned to deliver to the Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotten Home for Orphaned Children. 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. TalkGold was a Ponzi clearinghouse, where blind faith and curdled cynicism engaged in a demonic rumba. Robertson said something Cotten said around the time they were drawing up the will didn't sit right with her. Regarding speculation that he was still alive, Jennifer said, I saw Gerry die; I was holding his hand when he passed away. Deeds for properties she bought in 2016 show she was once known as Jennifer Forgeron. I love electric. The whole thing would cost $600,000, but expense never came uponly safety. He sent cash, in paper bags and shoeboxes, to coffee shops, laundromats, and pool halls. 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. We do not invest in stocks, bonds, shares, precious metals or antiques. 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. He might even be eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. More commonly, however, he will blame external forces (a meddlesome bank that freezes its accounts), provide fragmentary refunds, and equivocate until its investors give up hope. He was busy. During that time Quadriga continued to accept new funds but returned none. 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. No autopsy was requested. And I'll carry that shame with me, probably, every single day for the rest of my life," she said. "Details emerging about Gerald Cotten, the young founder of QuadrigaCX". There was also the fact that these were Canadian people, Canadian companies. It took some time for him to grow on her, but they eventually fell in love. She lives in Halifax. While Jennifer said she stopped processing payments in 2016, customer receipts showed the firm continued paying customers in 2017. Cotten returned for lessons the following summer, though not as often. 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. Investigative journalists Amy Castor and Takara Small have spent years following and reporting on the Quadriga scandal. 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. Which meant that Cotten was not really who he said he was either. $215M missing: Mysterious death of CEO of Canada's largest The median price for the properties was$346,000. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked questions so rudimentary that they shocked the experts they interviewed. 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. He used to say he didnt open up to many people, but he was able to open up to me.. 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. Nine days later Cotten is believed to have died due to complications of Crohn's disease, with Robertson announcing the death publicly a month later. When search suggestions are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Cotten himself warned of this danger during a 2014 interview. 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. With that, Bitcoin became like any other form of currency, a mass delusion: Its value derived from the belief that it had value. 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 . But on December 9, 2018, Gerry died at a local hospital because of complications resulting from Crohns disease at the age of 30. Was Quadriga built to last, in other words, or built to self-destruct? 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. 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. Apart from that, Jennifer is studying to become an elementary school teacher and hopes to graduate soon. 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 | CBC News Loaded. Wealth is freedom, read the prospectus. Gerry stopped running the company legally and ethically from a filing standpoint after all of the employees, directors and officers left in January 2016, he wrote recently. If the Mastermind Theory seems far-fetched, its worth pointing out that an exit scam can only succeed if it seems far-fetched. The media dragged Gerald Cotten's wife, Jennifer Robertson, into the spotlight after his mysterious death. ^ "Quadriga CEO's widow speaks out over his death and the missing crypto millions". "He also mentioned that the business would die without him," she said. Investing with Quadriga was even patriotic: People like the fact were located in Canada, Cotten told an interviewer, a point he often emphasized. A quadriga is a chariot yoked to four horses abreast. Here's everything you need to know, had been moving money from the exchange into his personal accounts, she agreed to forfeit $12 million in assets, to wait weeks before letting investors know, CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices. In February 2019, Jennifer insisted she was not privy to the companys business, asserting that Gerry was solely responsible for its dealings. 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. His news career began on the morning of Sept. 3, 1998 following the crash of Swissair 111. 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.. It put strangers at ease; it made him seem lighthearted. Once he left it behind on the Gulliver, which caused a momentary hysteria as the yacht had already departed the dock. After Michael Perklin met Cotten at a cryptocurrency meetup,they became friends and Perklinlater became an investor. Cotten opened his account three months later, shortly after his 15th birthday. His death left investors locked out of their money and left Jennifer Robertson, Gerrys wife, to deal with the fallout. Widow of Bitcoin trader Gerald Cotten who died owing $215M tells of The company took a cut from every Bitcoin trade on its platform. Under the most charitable interpretation of Cottens actions, the public bid marks the moment that he decided to go straight. 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. Roberston said she's sorry for Cotten's actions and the harm he's caused. 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. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. Gerald Cotten may have had a sophisticated grasp of cryptocurrency, but his expertisehis formal traininglay in the art of the confidence game. He befriended Cotten in 2016 in Toronto, where Cotten had moved during the effort to take Quadriga public. He would count on most people to forget all about him. If Gerry the Mastermind is alive, what is he doing? After his death, investigators discovered he used the money as his own personal slush fund. We thought, finallyGerry is standing up to Mike. He might be living on a private island, or in Hong Kong, Thailand, or Monaco, traveling by yacht and helicopter and private jet. 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. 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. Details Emerging On Death Of Crypto CEO Gerald Cotten: Report - NDTV 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.
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