He carried out one of the biggest cryptocurrency scams in history, and perhaps most of you are familiar with him from the Netflix documentary “Trust No One, The Hunt for the Crypto King.”
I’m talking, of course, about Gerald Cotten, the founder of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. So where did this name come from?
With a news published by Cointelegraph a few days ago, Cotten came back to our agenda:
Five wallets linked to the now defunct Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX and dormant for years have been spotted mobilizing $1.7 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC).
Crypto researcher ZachXBT alerted the crypto community in a December 19 Twitter post. ZachXBT announced that five wallets with a total of 104 Bitcoins transferred BTCs to various wallets on December 17.”
So let’s take a quick look at what’s going on…
Cotten was only 24 when the QuadrigaCX exchange launched in 2013, and when he died at the age of 30, it left 110,000 users with $190 million in savings behind it. Cotten was the only person who knew the cold wallet passwords of the exchange, and these passwords were never accessed again.
The year 2017 was a period when the Bitcoin rally started. Prices are rising rapidly. The users of the QuadrigaCX exchange are increasing day by day, and the trading volume of the exchange reaches 1.2 billion dollars that year. Of course, Gerry Cotten also leaves his modest life, buys expensive cars, houses and starts traveling constantly.
Happy days don’t last long. Problems begin with China and South Korea wanting to ban Bitcoin trading. Bitcoin drops from around $20,000 to $4,000 in December 2018. Users panic and try to withdraw their money, but this is not possible. Aren’t these developments very familiar to you?
While users have been waiting to withdraw money from the stock market for months, on January 14, 2019, the media; It’s announcing that Gerald Cotten died a month ago from Crohn’s disease while volunteering at an orphanage in India. It gets even more interesting because Gerald actually died on December 9, 2018, leaving all his assets to his wife, Jennifer Robertson, just 2 weeks before his death.
There were too many users who were victims and they never believed in this death. They started to investigate events by gathering in applications where the crypto world is active such as Reddit, Twitter, Telegram. Over time, many unexplained questions arose.
- Co-founder Michael Patryn, who left the stock market in 2016, changed his name twice before and was associated with fraud.
- He left all his property to his wife shortly before his death.
- 3% mortality rate from Crohn’s disease at a young age
- Gerald Cotten has been involved in fraud since the age of 14
- Misspelling of “Cotten” as “Cottan” on death certificate issued by the Indian government
- In the research conducted by Zerononcence, the exchange could not find evidence of the existence of a cold wallet.
Was this death really planned?
The Ontario Securities Commission concluded that Gerald Cotten used the exchange as a pyramid scheme by transferring users’ money to accounts opened under pseudonyms.
Perhaps the most interesting event in the history of the crypto market still remains a mystery. The X Files series, which the 90 generation knew well, had a motto; “Truth is out there” We trust blockchain transparency, Truth will one day emerge.
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