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It's really a story about betrayal and lying and greed.
[Clapping]
We're here to talk about bitcoin.
So, Gerald, starting with you.
So I created quadrigacx in 2013
and we basically are now the largest exchange in Canada
for buying and selling bitcoin.
[Clapping]
Congratulations.
[Amy] Before Gerald cotten died in India at age 30,
nobody could get their money off the exchange.
[Alexandra] It's amazing that the biggest question I have
is whether or not a person died.
["Greed and gold" by Seth lakerman playing]
[Reporter 1] Reported death of Nova Scotia businessman Gerald cotten is tragic.
[Reporter 2] When the 30-year-old died suddenly last month...
Leaving apparently, 250 million dollars
in cryptocurrency locked on his personal laptop.
Sounds pretty bleak for investors trying to get their money.
[Reporter 3] Cotten's widow, she doesn't know
the passwords to her late husband's laptop.
[Reporter 4] Most of the money is locked away in cyber space.
This is a real mystery that's unfolding this morning.
[Reporter 5] Right now investors, they can do nothing.
[Reporter 6] Something is tremendously fishy
about this whole exchange of where exactly the ceo went.
Conspiracy theorists suggest cotten faked his death.
[Reporter 7] Unless cotten made arrangements.
[Man] A dead man's switch would be something
that Gerry would've had to set up before he passed away.
[Female reporter] Investors are looking for answers.
Where is this money?
♪ Greed and gold ♪
♪ forever the loneliest road ♪
There's so much intrigue, there's so much funny business, you know?
So, it's kind of like connecting dots
and see what you can come up with.
[David] Maybe he was going to fake his death. Maybe he actually died.
- I don't know. - That's another good question.
[Amy] I am an independent journalist
and I research cryptocurrency.
First I got interested in it because of the technology
and then over time that led to, uh, a fascination with financial crimes.
Joe!
[Alexandra] I'm a business reporter.
I generally cover capital markets,
but I've also kind of taken up this side hobby
of writing about the sort of wacky world of cryptocurrency.
I still sometimes just think about this story all this time later.
- What do you still think about? - I don't know.
There's so many crazy theories out there on the Internet.
I found out about quadriga very early on.
It was 2013, I was an intern at the Canadian press newswire
and came across the fact that Canada was getting its first ever bitcoin atm.
[Female reporter] It's now up and running at the waves coffee shop
in downtown Vancouver.
[Male reporter] The virtual currency is traded in cyber space
and stored in the user's online wallet.
[Female reporter] And you go to a business that accepts it,
they ring you up, you can scan a code on your phone,
your balance goes down and now you're enjoying your morning cup of tea.
[Amy] A bitcoin atm is a standalone machine
where you can go up, put in cash,
and you can buy bitcoin just like that.
Once you go through a bitcoin atm
you've got your bitcoin and then you can
begin trading it on an exchange like quadriga.
[Clapping]
So, for those of you who aren't familiar
with bitcoin exchanges and what we do.
I like to compare it to a stock exchange,
however, instead of trading stocks
on our exchange, people trade bitcoin.
You have buyers and you have sellers,
and they get matched, and they transact with one another.
[Man] Our guest tonight is Michael patryn from quadriga.
Well, in mid-2013 the only exchange of note in Canada was vortex,
they had a monopoly which many believe they were abusing.
So the co-founder Gerald and I believed
that we could do better and, uh, quadriga was born.
Michael patryn was about five years older than Gerald,
so he, you know, I think he was like a big brother to them.
[Keyboard clacking]
So he was one of the people that taught Gerald the ropes in this sort of business.
[Ryan] As far as, uh, crypto exchange founders go,
Gerald actually had a fairly public presence
presenting the image of a trustworthy businessman, of a trustworthy entrepreneur.
And he was, you know, speaking our language.
[Man 1] Today we are joined by Gerry cotten,
the director of bitcoin co-op,
the founder of quadrigacx.Com.
[Man 2] And let me paint the picture.
Mr. Cotten looked probably exactly
what you think an Internet genius would look like.
A young attractive man.
[Man 1] I was doing some research 'cause I knew you were coming this week.
To be honest, I got more confused doing the research.
[Laughing]
[Gerald] With bitcoin, so it's just a string of numbers and letters
sending a payment to another string of numbers and letters.
When I send the transaction, it's recognized
by a bunch of other peers in the network.
And then it's publicly recorded into the public ledger
which is called the "blockchain."
See, that's the cool part about bitcoin, there's a public ledger.
So you can actually see all transactions
- that happen in the bitcoin network. - [Man 1] Ever? Really?
[Gerald] Ever. Yeah. So it essentially removes the need
for a central authority. It's like the bank.
It's interesting that this all kind of came out
in the sort of aftermath of the global financial crisis.
That crisis made a lot of people stop and go,
"well, why are we trusting these financial institutions?
Why are we trusting these banks?"
[Gerald] There's no need for a central authority
because everyone is a central authority.
[Man 1] Oh, right.
[Gerald] It's the beauty of it. Then you get rid of the fees
- and a lot of the boarders and things like that. - [Man 1] Right.
[Man 2] Well, how does Joe schmo get involved?
[Gerald] Well, the first thing I recommend doing is visiting bitcoin co-op.
[Upbeat music playing]
You can find a ton of information there.
Basically discussions about bitcoin
and what's going on in the industry and so forth.
This is the central. The door is magnet locked.
We first got the place, uh, as a hang out for the crypto community.
Bitcoin co-op. That's, uh, and we did all the outreach stuff.
Uh, our hall of shame. Failed moneys.
This is a, I don't wanna say central hub,
that sounds oxymoronic or something.
Quadriga, those guys, they came to the co-op
offering basically to fund our outreach events.
Like, we got a table at car free day,
we gave away free coins to people.
They got a lot of publicity for their associations with us.
[Gerald] Every Monday night, we actually have our bitcoin co-op meeting.
So we've had times when 50 people show up.
[Man 1] Oh, yeah.
[Gerald] And everyone's just interested in bitcoin.
[Alex] I get to the meetup early and Mike would be there.
He'd walk me through trading concepts, and he just did this
and the same way I get excited about bitcoin, he got excited about trading.
He had money, and he was a confirmed good trader.
You can look at him posting his public positions early on
and making some really good calls.
He was really nice, but so is Gerry.
Gerry was really nice too. Always smiling, always happy.
Pull that up to there.
He helped my kids buy bitcoin from an atm,
there's still a video on YouTube of that.
Okay, now click "send bitcoins."
[Alex] Yeah, he was a pilot for fun.
And he was really just super friendly.
[Amber] In many ways Toronto bitcoiners
are a pretty small, um, tight knit community.
I'm the founder and ceo at outlier solutions
we're an anti-money laundering compliance consultant firm.
So we spent most of our time trying to keep people out of trouble.
I started going to meet ups.
That was where I first learned about quadriga and where I first met Gerry.
He was a really likeable guy.
Cool. It works.
He was a really bright guy, he was really funny.
[Gerald] One of the best parts about Canada's new money
is that it's fully waterproof. Check it out.
[Amber] I was a person who had strong suspicions
and I didn't come out and say that publicly back in the day.
And I think that there are a lot of folks
in the community that are in the same boat,
where we had a lot of reservations in terms of quadriga generally,
but we liked Gerry and we didn't wanna see them fail
and we didn't call it out publicly.
[Laughing]
[Amy] In 2015, the two other major exchanges in Canada went out of business.
And that made quadrigacx the main game in town, you know?
That was, they were the big exchange at the time.
What happened to the former largest bitcoin exchange?
Um, they just cited a variety of reasons. Banking troubles, legal.
We'll probably find out a lot more about them in the coming days,
but as a result of them shutting down,
- it's been great for me. - [Man] Yes.
[Laughing]
[Michael] It's been a very, very busy time
and a very exciting time for us.
Our volume has more than doubled
since they announced closure of vortex.
[Man] Well, we think you should buy a really big boat too.
I think he'll get that before we get a boat.
[Laughing]
We have announced that quadrigacx will be going public.
I know.
[Clapping]
In 2015, they start, you know, promoting it
as the soon to be first publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange.
Um, and at the time I thought, well, you know,
"if they go public, that'll be a pretty big story."
We have some plans that I'm itching to tell you about,
but there are amazing press releases
and I've been told to shut up about them.
Michael patryn, he was kind of instrumental
to this push to take quadriga public.
And then the effort to take quadriga public ultimately fails.
Patryn says that him and Gerry have a big falling out.
His involvement in the company ended
and he stopped knowing anything
about the day-to-day operations of quadriga.
[Ryan] It does seem as though Mike
had ceased involvement in 2016.
It seems that way. Emphasis on "seems."
After that time, cotten operated quadrigacx as a one-man band.
[Ryan] Maybe he didn't want to lose control.
Maybe he kinda liked having the situation where he had total autonomy
over this exchange and just so much power.
People got into bitcoin because they liked the idea
of getting rich for free. Magical Internet money.
I'm a cryptocurrency journalist
and the author of the book attack of the 50 foot blockchain.
This came out in July, 2017,
just as the big cryptocurrency bubble was on its upswing.
I started putting a few thousand dollars in bitcoin
and then, few months later it went from $1,000 to $2,000.
I was like, "wow, I made 100% of my return."
So bitcoin, the software is just an open source software,
anyone can copy it and twiddle it a bit and they've got a new coin.
[Taylor] The bubble of 2017, that bubble was people pretty much just
trading between the different crypto currencies
and making a lot of money doing it.
Like a lot of money doing it.
♪ Bitcoin, ripple, ethereum ♪
♪ got me investing in each of them ♪
♪ bitcoin, ripple, ethereum ♪
♪ I've got that crypto making me millions ♪
I turned $350 into $12,000.
[Reporter] He became a millionaire at 24.
You absolutely can make a lot of money.
The dizzying ascent continued today.
It hit a peak in December, mid-December where it was nearly $20,000.
♪ Bitcoin, ripple, ethereum ♪
In 2017, about over a billion dollars
in transactions went through the exchange.
There's so much money coming on to quadriga now.
All of a sudden he's got this windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The other key player is Jennifer robertson.
That is Gerald cotten's girlfriend, ultimately, his wife.
I knew that he was engaged, but he was very private and very quiet about that.
People who thought that they knew him quite well
said that she sort of came out of the woodwork. They didn't know who she was.
We know that she changed her name,
which makes her quite mysterious.
She was Jennifer Griffith and now she's Jennifer robertson.
There were also these rumors.
At one time she seems to have used the name Jennifer forgeron.
She didn't become Jennifer cotten.
We know very little about Gerald's wife. Very, very little.
We do know that Gerald was living a very lavish lifestyle,
which included a lot of travel,
the purchasing of at least one plane...
Jen and Gerry lived a life of luxury.
He had this 51 foot sailboat.
We know that they had all of these properties together.
All of these wonderful vacations,
staying in these fancy looking hotels.
Mostly when we corresponded it was electronically,
and he was usually traveling somewhere.
So I just got the sense that he was travelling
and enjoying the "work from wherever you are" mentality.
But definitely there were also problems there.
It's late 2017, early 2018...
And the price of bitcoin now is falling.
The cryptocurrency has gone from hitting
a new record price yesterday to nose diving today.
[Amy] You know, there's a lot of trades on the exchange.
The platform can't keep up with the business.
And then they start to run into some real problems.
[Alexandra] There is this theory
that the company's financial troubles
started with this ethereum incident.
In 2017, the company came out and said
there was some sort of technical glitch
that caused them to lose a bunch of ether.
[Ryan] So this money was effectively sent into a black hole.
You know, it went undetected for a very long time.
[Taylor] I was part of a Skype group
that when the quadriga team discovered
they accidentally locked up $14 million on the ether blockchain,
that Skype group is sort of where they posted it
to try to figure out what was going on.
And so this ether just sits in this contract to this day.
- No one can access it. - It's just like a, it's like a contract bug.
Yeah, it was just the contract was not, it was not a smart contract.
There's no way that you could recover for this
unless you expected the price of ether
to go 4x in two months, which nobody did.
[Amy] So, they lose 14 million.
The bigger problem is that cibc, which is a big bank in Canada,
they essentially freeze about $25 million.
[Alexandra] It's not uncommon in the crypto world
for crypto companies to have issues getting banking.
The banks are concerned about money laundering,
they don't necessarily understand blockchain,
they don't know how to trace transactions.
We've all heard of the issues where banks
are closing down banks accounts
for different bitcoin exchanges. It's a huge mess.
[Amy] So quadriga can't get any type of banking.
If you would send money to quadriga,
you would send it to one of their third party payment processors.
So what a third party payment processor is,
essentially it's like a shell company.
And those sort of funnel money
through this web of accounts or shell companies.
The cibc funds, they're frozen 'cause they didn't know the source of the accounts.
[Andrew] It was very annoying for customers.
They'd be like, "hey, give quadriga back their money, jerk.
I'm trying to withdraw my money, stupid bank."
[Amber] I did see the complaints escalating.
Because businesses in the cryptocurrency world
have trouble maintaining a bank account,
the idea that, okay, so your transaction might be delayed,
your withdrawal might be delayed, is not that unusual.
[Tong] They posted Facebook updates every day.
Almost every day during this time
and even on Reddit people were always saying,
"oh, people always got their money."
It just took a while, but no one ever, you know,
didn't receive their money at that time.
This is October 2018. So I believed them.
[Amy] January 14th, 2019.
I remember that morning quite clearly.
There was this notice from quadriga that Gerald cotten died suddenly.
[Amber] I was really shocked.
I was really sad.
I really liked him.
[Nathan] I'd seen the headlines.
Reddit was going crazy, there were questions all over
and we didn't really know anything at that point.
We knew that he had been in India.
[Amy] They had apparently gone to India
because, to celebrate their honeymoon, right?
And to open this orphanage.
[Alexandra] After talking to people,
we discovered that he had had digestive issues
and specifically crohn's for some time.
It's kind of rare these days for people to die of crohn's.
He has this horrible episode that starts
with what just looks like traveler's diarrhea
and then ends in three cardiac arrests and his death.
And apparently the only person by his side continuously until Gerry died was Jennifer.
[Amy] Rather than letting people know right away that Gerald cotten had died,
she withheld that information.
They've been operating for a full month after he died.
Yeah, it doesn't... It doesn't make a lot of sense, right?
Like how do you... How do you square that?
[Amy] It sort of brings up the question,
what role did Jennifer robertson play in all this, you know?
I mean there's just question after question after question.
[Amy] Jennifer robertson then became at that point
the largest shareholder in quadriga.
So then the sort of panic about withdrawals escalates.
They put in limits. $50,000 per month.
People were trying to get their money out but they couldn't.
It was obvious things were really bad.
[Alexandra] Suddenly the site goes down.
My stomach turned. I knew what it meant.
No one ever sees that in the exchange site
and doesn't think, "is all my money gone?"
[Amy] That was quite a big red flag.
[Tong] I never stopped seeing red for months now.
And then I believe it was a day or two after that
there was a notice on the website
that says quadriga has filed for creditor protection.
My co-writer Joe castaldo got the filing from the courthouse,
and he says, "oh, my god! There's $180 million of crypto
that seems to be missing and there's $250 million total
that is owed to people and they can't get any of it."
And at that point we knew we had
a pretty big story on our hands.
[Amy] That moment when that notice appeared on the quadriga website,
that was, that was sort of like, "wow."
This is when people really realized what happened.
[Ryan] Panic. Worry.
Yeah, just a cocktail of, uh, negative emotions.
Yeah, I just went like, "wow, this really happened to me. Unbelievable."
[Alexandra] We were pulling 18-hour days.
I would go to sleep thinking about quadriga,
and I would wake up thinking about quadriga.
First we started with the actual contents of the filings, ccaa filing.
'Cause there was a lot of information in there.
You know, all the affidavits were in there
of, you know, Jen talking about how the business was being run.
She said that she was not really...
That she was not at all involved in the company operations.
But we do know that Jennifer had a quadriga e-mail address.
We know that Jennifer ran a company called robertson nova
that was processing payments on behalf of quadriga.
[Joe] I remember reading the court filings
like it was clear that quadriga was barely a real company.
It was just Gerry with his computer.
[Amber] He was the sole director, so this is one person,
one young man who had access
to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of funds.
It really seems that Gerry had kept
the other employees in the dark.
There was only seven contractors, I believe.
There were some chat logs that were leaked
by Aaron Matthews with the contractors.
[Alexandra] According to these chat logs,
Gerry, he basically just took over running the company himself.
[Mitch] If you wanted to withdraw,
Aaron would send a request to Gerry
and then Gerry would honor that request manually.
He was the only one that actually controlled
like the crypto, the cold wallets.
Your cold wallet, that'd be your bank vault
that has 100 million bucks in it.
And then the hot wallet would be like the teller who has like 10 grand cash.
So if you Rob the teller, you're not getting all that's in the bank vault.
If you lose the keys of the bank vault, you've lost the gold bars.
This is exactly how it works.
If you lose that key, your coin's gone.
[Mitch] It's not normal for an exchange owner to be the only key holder.
I was very surprised to read about the keys.
So the idea that no one else had access to any backups in any meaningful way.
He was so diligent, and he was so paranoid in so many ways
that there would've been something somewhere.
He paid lip service to having cold wallets
spread in different, uh, safety deposit boxes.
[Gerald] We're obviously holding a bunch of bitcoin.
So what we do is we actually store them offline
in paper wallets in our bank vault, in a deposit box,
because that's the best way to keep the coin secure.
[Ryan] And Gerald makes reference
to a safe that he had bolted to the rafters of his attic.
When the safe was investigated,
all that was found were four, four holes.
So where's the safe?
How the hell can you be in this space
and be controlling so much money
and not have any sort of backup plan.
Was there a contingency plan that failed?
Was there perhaps some plan such as a dead man switch, for example?
[Ryan] Dead man switch is a mechanism a coder could set up.
[Mitch] Say, if Gerry didn't put a password in for 30 days,
then, you know, his private keys
would be sent to someone who can take care of it.
And if there was no plan, why was there no plan? Was it hubris?
Was that Gerry thinking that he was invincible?
That nothing could happen to him?
Was it because Gerry didn't feel like he could trust anyone?
What happened, Gerry? Where's the money?
I certainly have a lot of empathy
for people who lost money in quadriga.
[Tong] Actually, I think this is, uh, we can do a left turn here.
It was just the shock of how could my timing be this bad?
If I had sold my house any time else
this wouldn't have happened to me.
Yeah, I pretty much ended up, uh, losing my life's savings because of it.
I lost about $400,000 in quadrigacx, right?
So I posted this video, it's a very candid video because I was very frustrated.
As humans often do we get greedy and we get selfish
and I was jealous of my friends for making so much money,
so, um, I kinda took a big risk.
I actually took out three loans from the bank and I put it all in crypto,
which as you know, um, crypto crashed.
And I put myself into an even deeper hole.
And the only way for me to dig myself
out of that hole is to sell my apartment.
So that's what I did.
Yeah, my apartment's pretty much right at the end of this street.
I was in the west one, which is this one right here.
Fifth floor.
I sold it at the time when I also wanted to move back to Canada.
I wanted to quit my job, but it's what came after,
you know, that would kind of really shook me.
I was looking for an alternate way
to move my money from us to Canada
and why didn't I go through the bank?
Well, the banks usually charges a 1 or 2% commission,
but quadrigacx had a 10% premium at the time.
[Announcer] Be sure to visit quadrigacx.Com.
Canada's best bitcoin exchange.
This is what I thought cryptocurrency was invented to do
as to easily move money between, um, different places, right?
[Announcer] Global withdraw options
including direct payments to any visa card worldwide.
Quadriga definitely knew how to pull people in.
[Announcer] You'll never have trouble moving funds
into and out of your quadrigacx account.
Canada's best bitcoin exchange.
I was in... I was really depressed, right?
I was basically gambling with my money.
[Amber] The only investment advice that I ever give anyone
when it comes to bitcoin, cryptocurrency,
anything that's really high risk
is think about all of your money.
Picture it just catching fire and burning slowly
and at the point where you start to cry
make sure that you're putting less than that
into something that's super high risk.
[Andrew] The most important thing all viewers,
anyone watching this has to know,
is note your keys, note your coins,
never leave all your money on the exchange.
Where people run into danger is where they try
and turn their bitcoins into more bitcoins by using their bitcoins.
[Ryan] Having a background on computer science
I was able to appreciate crypto.
I was fortunate enough to discover it very early on.
I had stored much of my wealth in bitcoin.
I wanted to take the fortune I had generated,
diversify it and move on to other things.
Because quadriga was the biggest exchange in Canada
and because the amount that I was dealing with had grown quite large
the only logical place to pull it out
of the ecosystem was through quadriga.
[Reporter] More than 100 thousand people
found their money appeared to have vanished
and experts are skeptical people will ever see
a fraction of what they're owed.
It's difficult to let it go.
And maybe even it shouldn't be let go
until we do have clear answers
regarding whether or not there's money still out there.
I, uh, tried to rally people on Reddit.
You know, it wasn't long after that we had a telegram group
with, you know, new people joining by the minute.
[Tong] So we all kinda flocked to the telegram group.
At the beginning we was just thinking about
let's get ourselves some lawyers,
try to get some of our money back
and, uh, try to understand what's going on.
So then Joe had the bright idea to go and track down the will.
[Amy] In November, Gerald writes his very detailed will.
On December 9th, he dies in India.
The fact that he had updated this will
just two weeks before he died, that was a real shocker.
[Amy] And mind you, this is 2018,
so everything's falling apart on the exchange.
The problems with the bank, people are complaining
that they can't get their money off the exchange.
So, things are falling apart. He writes a very detailed will.
It's almost like he knew that something was going to happen to him.
The will was fascinating cause we discovered all of these assets.
[Joe] You know, 17 properties, a yacht, a plane, a Lexus, a mini Cooper.
[Amy] Jennifer robertson is the executer. When he dies mysteriously,
she gets all the assets, right?
[Alexandra] And to us, one of our favorites,
was that he has these two chihuahuas named nitro and gully.
He had left this sum of money.
There's $100,000 trust for the care of these two chihuahuas
in the event that Jennifer doesn't survive him.
Nitro and gully.
- [Joe] I think they're doing okay. - [Alexandra] I do.
Just how, like, meticulous he was about laying out
what was gonna happen to his assets, even his dogs,
like, after he died and yet compare that
to the mess that quadriga was. It was crazy.
[Reporter] The cryptocurrency confusion is attracting
a growing number of lawyers and accountants
suggesting they can sort it out.
Ernst and young were brought in to be the monitors
on the ccaa protection, which is the stage before bankruptcy.
[Reporter] Ernst and young, the court appointed monitor
says it has secured a total of 11 electronic devices used by Gerald cotten,
and is working to gain access to the assets that are still off limits.
Plans are also underway for a forensic review.
An effort by crypto experts to figure out how to find all those missing investments.
[Alexandra] You've got this firm from the sort
of traditional mainstream financial world.
You know, they're having to wrap their minds
around this whole new asset class.
There's a lot of questions about where all the cash was flowing,
and this is why Ernst and young
clearly got the high-powered forensic accountants on it.
Um, because they needed them.
[Amy] The first two Ernst and young reports came out.
There were no company bank accounts, there was no segregation of funds.
Everything was sort of mixed in together into a giant pool.
As the accountants go through everything,
I mean, they had a heck of a time.
[Alexandra] There seems to have been no accounting system.
Maybe there is in this, you know, encrypted laptop that nobody can get access to.
How do you get in a position where you're managing $200 million
and you literally don't have a single,
like, balance sheet at all? What? Like what?
With bitcoin, it's all in the public sphere.
Anyone can check it, anyone can verify it.
If I say I own something, Alex can prove it,
Anthony can prove it, anyone can prove it
just by looking on the Internet.
Their claim was that, was not that the money was gone, right?
Their claim was that the private keys
that protected the piles of money were gone.
Which meant that there should still be piles of money somewhere on the blockchain.
I literally just wanted to answer the question
of how much money is in the ether wallets,
what are the addresses and that's how it started. [Laughing]
That's how it started.
[Tense music playing]
[Taylor] I'm the founder and ceo of mycrypto.
Mycrypto is a non-custodial wallet for cryptocurrency.
Non-custodial means that we don't hold your funds,
but we basically allow people to interact with the blockchain,
access their funds, send their funds around,
but we don't actually hold them.
So, my investigation, once again,
did not start as like a "let me investigate quadriga."
Basically my plan was like, you know,
spend a couple of hours, find the addresses,
I'll post them on Reddit and move on with my life.
There are just so many transactions, like 700,000 transactions.
And so one trick that I use is that
it'll just automatically color the addresses.
The red addresses, the one that we're analyzing,
the blue is quadriga's 2016 address
and then it'll change to green and then purple.
And then you can just scroll through them,
and you'll start to notice patterns appear.
When I found, like, the first address
I was like, "if I dump the whole spreadsheet," right?
"The whole ledger. If I grab all the data and then I sort it,
by, like, the highest to the lowest,
I should be able to see where the money goes."
Basically like three weeks later...
I still didn't know where the money went.
And then I did things like combining all the addresses
and then sorting by the amount,
and I did things like separating the outgoing transactions
from the incoming ones, but at the end of the day, there's no piles of money.
Period.
So you can find the private keys all you want, there's still no piles of money,
so, you know, what the hell happened?
[Nathan] What happened to that money?
And if it is in cryptocurrency,
why is it proving so elusive to find?
There is this paper trail, this digital ledger
of every single transaction that anyone can access, but the identities are masked.
So you can see the address of a bitcoin wallet
that moved money to another bitcoin wallet,
but you wouldn't necessarily know who controls those wallets.
[Amy] The court appointed monitor and the ccaa process
found six bitcoin wallets,
um, that were all emptied out by April 2018.
Ui did an investigation and said, "no,
there's nothing more in the cold wallets."
Where is it then?
[Taylor] Everything is all bull.
The answers are out there.
And you start looking at the things and where the money moved,
and the biggest money movements that we saw was expected
which is big chunks of money moving between
sort of these three storage accounts
that quadriga used between, like, 2016 and 2018.
But then you see, like, some other addresses pop up.
So, this is one of those weird red addresses.
It is an address that just really consistently appears
from the very beginning of quadriga.
There's these other accounts that money was sent to.
Maybe all the single transactions were 100 ether.
But there were thousands of them.
This is insane.
When you look at the ust sort of equivalents,
you have this list of addresses that have received $40 million,
$50 million, $100 million.
And then the question is, "okay, so who owns these addresses? Right?"
Who the hell is quadriga sending $100 million to?
So, if we go to this specific address, it's poloniex.
So this is a poloniex address.
Someone sent money to their quadriga deposit address,
and their money was then sent to a poloniex deposit address
immediately without touching quadriga's hot wallet.
Like, that's weird. That's not normal.
- That's pretty crazy. - Right?
Why would an exchange take money that customers have deposited
and send it to another exchange?
The absolute most legitimate reason that I could possibly think of was, like,
that they were doing something with their own profits, you know, it's...
Not necessarily responsible,
but it's totally legal for a company to take their profits and, um, invest them.
[Gerald] Arbitrage is actually one thing that I've done quite a bit of.
[Man] But what's arbitrage?
[Gerald] Arbitrage is basically a financial term
where you buy something at a lower price,
resell it at a higher price instantly,
so you never actually have any chance of losing money.
[Ryan] Price differences between exchanges were often quite significant.
It's often a fraction of 1%,
but if we're talking millions of dollars,
then that could be a significant profit
for the person who facilitates that trade.
[Man] How many coins do you buy at a time like this?
[Gerald] Oh, like hundreds or so...
[Man] Really?
[Gerald] Yeah, it was very profitable in November and...
[Man] Are we hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg now? Is that what's going on?
There's this theory out there that he lost the money
by trying to trade his way out of debt.
[Andrew] The beginning of Gerry's snowball
was theory in classic loss and the banking loss.
Started his snowball where he thinks,
"well, I'm only 30 million in the hole.
I bet if this gamble pays off I can recuperate,
no one will never know what happened."
[David] Gerry seems to have thought
that he could trade his way out of his problems.
This sort of trading that's gambling.
He was just really bad at it, he lost all the money
and it's like, "why did you do this?"
It looks very like an overconfident idiot.
[Taylor] I'm not convinced that he is a bumbling idiot
because if you're operating an exchange, there is...
Opportunity to do a whole bunch of nefarious things.
The strongest, I guess, theory I have is,
like, some sort of money laundering.
[Amber] Criminals commit crimes,
those crimes generate profits, they want to hide the money
by moving it through the financial system
and the process of hiding that money is called money laundering.
Cryptocurrency is both very easy to trace and very hard to trace.
[Alexandra] There could be wallets that people didn't even know about.
Once you get to another exchange,
then only the exchange knows what happened with those transactions. Right?
Because they could be transferred between
different accounts at that exchange,
it could be converted between different currencies,
then it could move to a different exchange
through a different wallet address
and at that point you sort of lose the paper trail.
As soon as you start involving different countries,
different currencies, it becomes much harder to trace.
[Taylor] I went on Twitter, and I said like,
"here's some interesting transactions or interesting patterns."
And that's when the people that had been doing the research,
the journalists, that's when they stared at me, like,
"so you guys followed the money, but, like,
here's his social background.
Here's the business documents, here's the list of people,
like, real life people in his life."
And that's when I was like, "oh, shit, this is amazing."
Like, "this is terrible. This is like the best story ever."
[Alexandra] The Internet was filled with all these rumors about Michael patryn.
Yeah, those rumors were very persistent.
I know, I was very intrigued by it cause I looked up Michael patryn
and I saw that he graduated from the university or something,
so I just e-mailed the school to find out like, "hey, did this guy actually graduate?"
And they said we have no record of somebody with that name.
I was like, "okay, that's not adding up.
There must be something more going on here."
Been working with digital currency since about 2003.
Everything okay?
[Alexandra] Someone at the time had posted how he was actually
this money launderer or that he was an identity theft.
And that he actually went by a different name which was Omar dhanani.
Omar dhanani is a guy who served time in prison in the United States
for his role in an identity theft and credit card fraud ring
called "shadow crew."
And the service that he provided to shadow crew members
was a money laundering service.
So shadow crew gets busted by us authorities.
And he was sentenced to 18 months,
and it does look like he served close to that sentence.
And then we've managed to obtain the booking photo
of Omar dhanani from the passaic county sheriff's office in New Jersey
where he was taking in on his shadow crew charges
and we tell Michael patryn,
"look, we have these two photos of you.
And I mean, they're of you." [Chuckling]
Close to 15 years had past between those two photos,
but it's still very clearly the same person.
He's got the same facial features.
You can see there's some kind of, like, scar or pock Mark
or something kind of on his forehead.
And so he asks us to send him the photos.
So we obliged, we sent him the photos.
[Joe] Yeah, he told us
"while I obviously disagree with your conclusions,
I have to wait for counsel prior to responding more thoroughly,
which is unlikely to happen before your deadline."
Bye-bye.
[David] Bloomberg went and found the, uh, actual name changes.
[Alexandra] He went from Omar dhanani
to Omar patryn and ultimately to Michael patryn.
[David] So his name is Michael patryn,
that's his legal name, but he is the same guy
who was Omar dhanani, the convicted hacker.
And we had even asked him, remember?
We said, "are you Omar dhanani?" And he just said "no."
A man of mystery, I guess.
[Tense music playing]
[Andrew] This is our headquarters of sorts. I can see your car from here.
You are currently not being robbed.
I knew Mike better than Gerry.
Some people called him a huge tough guy.
One time, his dog got hurt and he practically cried.
A tiny little dog. It's kind of humorous to me.
Like, "wow, that's gangster of you."
I think that's probably a lot of people who do bad things.
People are very complicated.
Like, I heard accusations about identity theft,
and I told them, "you have to tell me the truth, your name, what you've done."
And he just refused to be honest with me.
So I just said, "we can't be friends anymore."
How do you get to a point where this individual
who's definitely known to police in Canada
is responsible for people's money?
[Upbeat music playing]
[Amy] Why would Michael patryn step out of the picture?
And what was Michael patryn doing
between 2016 when he left quadriga and 2019...
[Amy] We know a lot more about Gerald cotten now and Michael patryn.
We found out that they met
long before they launched quadriga together.
Michael patryn, he met Gerald back, way back when,
we think he met Gerald probably on the talkgold forms in around 2003.
This was ten years before quadriga launched.
Talkgold forms, that was a form for promoting Ponzi schemes.
[Tong] He was in high school and that's where he met Mike patryn.
He's been doing this kind of schemy stuff since he was young.
[Joe] Do you remember s&s investments when he was a teenager?
[Alexandra] Yeah, of course.
His first Ponzi scheme that we found. Like,
he did lose investors' money then too and tried to return it all.
[David] Gerry cotten he was a Ponzi schemer since he was 15.
And he's a guy who thought, "I can get money out of people just for the asking."
Yeah, I actually, uh, heard a sort of an anecdote
about how he, uh, was buying candy from a confectionary,
reselling it to kids in several countries.
You know, you can look at that as an ambitious young entrepreneur,
but I don't think I'd go that far.
[Alexandra] After he's released from prison,
we know that Omar dhanani was deported to Canada
and then registered a company called midas gold.
It's basically an exchanger for Liberty reserve.
This, uh, very large black market bank.
So he gets back into moving money again,
cause that's what he knows best.
There was evidence that Gerald cotten was involved in that as well.
[Alexandra] And then Liberty reserve, of course, gets busted.
[Amy] So that's done with.
So what next?
Well, suddenly, cotten and patryn appear in Vancouver
in the bitcoin, you know, community.
With bitcoin you basically get rid of that large corporation.
So I was really, really fascinated with that technology.
He talked up this sort of libertarian bitcoin angle.
"I believe in everything you guys believe, you should trust me."
Everyone liked them. They supported the community
in a time when no one else really would.
He almost never said anything in co-op meetings.
He sat there and smiled.
Always smiling.
Maybe in hindsight there's a red flag
that someone too generous is too good to be true.
[Taylor] Money laundering and scamming people in Ponzi,
once you realize that Gerald's been doing that...
It's harder to say, like, you know, flip a coin
and he could be a bumbling idiot or an evil genius.
Like, you look at it and you just go...
"Well, what are the chances that both these people
literally turned over a new leaf
six months after their last Ponzi exit scam?"
Fifth report, that was the, um, really excoriating one.
Yeah. [Laughing]
[Taylor] We have found out later through Ernst and young,
Gerald cotten was setting up fake accounts on the exchange.
14 fake accounts, things, names like "aretwo deetwo."
And "seethree peaohh."
So if you would send money to quadriga,
what you would see in your quadriga account
would be not real Canadian dollars,
but what were called quad bucks.
[Alexandra] Quadrigacx bucks.
This was kind of an in between currency.
[Amy] They weren't real dollars.
Now, the problem with that is you can make money out of nothing.
He was funding these accounts with fake crypto, fake dollars.
["Dirty cash" by the adventures of Stevie v playing]
[Amy] Bitcoin atm, they're great tools for money laundering.
If you didn't wanna have a financial trail,
you just go and feed that cash
and it was hooked right up to the exchange.
♪ Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, ooh ♪
♪ money talks, money talks ♪
♪ dirty cash I want you... ♪
People could actually, if they withdrew money from the exchange,
if they could go and pick up cash at a certain location.
They'd even have boxes of cash sent to them to their door, okay?
Shoe boxes of cash delivered.
That's a tip off for some funny business right there.
According to court documents that we have from Ernst and young,
Gerald cotten would direct these third party payment processors
or shell companies to, to funnel money directly into his bank account
and the accounts of, of Jennifer robertson.
♪ Dirty cash I want you. Dirty cash... ♪
- Oh, that's great. - They even stole...
The stove full of all the unpaid checks. That's just fabulous.
There was a great photo which was from one of the,
hearings of stove top
with bundles of bank drafts sitting on it.
That have been there two years uncashed.
People were sending them money in 2017,
they never even banked it or cashed it in any way.
It's like, "how does that work?"
It was some sort of money laundering chop-shop.
We take steps to make sure that people
aren't laundering funds through our system.
We obviously don't wanna facilitate any sort of illicit transaction of that type.
[David] I'm just imagining the person that Ernst and young
are writing those monitor reports.
They don't actually say "and everyone involved
should go to jail immediately."
But they totally meant it.
So you have to have a certain intelligence
and understanding of people and greed to be a good conman.
It's possible that he realized sometime in 2018
that he'd really screwed up his own con.
At what point he started to think,
"maybe I have to have an idea for how to step out of this."
[David] The scam was collapsing.
He couldn't keep it going any longer, then oops he died.
Quite soon after he died, uh, someone came to me and said,
"dude, he's not dead."
[Amy] It was the time of his death that made people wonder
was there a possibility that he had faked his death? Was this an exit scam?
If you were going to fake a death,
India would be a great place to do that.
[Alex] You know, dying on his honeymoon
while building an orphanage for children,
this is all, like, too perfect.
So nice that it's a red flag for me.
[Alexandra] He's building an orphanage, okay?
Well, maybe he's a philanthropist
and then I kind of ran that by a couple of people
and they said, "no, we never really knew Gerry
to have this sort of charitable side."
[Amy] Everything is falling apart in the exchange,
and it was at this point where make or break.
And we have seen exit scams in the cryptocurrency world before.
[Mitch] And then someone came on the Reddit, qcx contractor,
they claimed to be a contractor
and they showed of internal screenshots of company communications.
They're not confident he's dead.
They're at the funeral, didn't see a body.
[Alex] So, this is something I came up with.
So this is a full theory.
There is this stuff is known as Haitian zombie powder.
So witch doctors in Haiti, what they do is they'll give you this drug
which makes you appear dead for up to a few days until you get the cure.
[Tense music playing]
The conspiracy theorists on the Internet are like, "he's definitely alive."
Like, no, everyone is like, "we don't know if he's dead.
We don't know if he's alive. Flip a coin."
[Nathan] The rumors were quite rampant
that perhaps he had faked his own death.
People have dug up old news reports
from other parts of India with fake death rings.
To me it wasn't so much being driven by conflicting hypothesis,
so much as it was kind of the thrill of the chase.
[Tense music playing]
[Nathan] It was my assignment to go to jaipur and try to piece together
what happened in his final hours.
The first task was to find the death certificate.
We hopped in an auto rickshaw
and made it to the registrar's office, which was small.
There were desks and shelves that were just stacked full of papers.
And, uh, the next thing we know,
they had pulled up the actual death certificate
and they said, "would you like a copy?" And we said, "sure."
And I just remember, I was working with the local journalists
who speaks hindi, a local fixer, um,
and just high fiving like, "wow, this is great. We got it!"
You know? "This is happening!"
The death certificate had his name spelled wrong.
It was cottan with c-o-t-t-a-n.
That death certificate came from the official computer of the registrar,
and it confirmed the address of the deceased
at the time of death was, uh, the oberoi rajvilas hotel,
which is the most expensive hotel in the city.
We got in another auto rickshaw,
and we traipsed across the city to the oberoi rajvilas.
This place was built sort of as a modern day palace.
Very, very large, sort of verdant grounds.
It's quiet, there's peacock calls.
I'm not sure there are that many guests
who show up at the oberoi rajvilas in, um, in auto rickshaw.
But then eventually they let us in and then we said,
"we'd like to speak with the general manager."
He just said, you know, "it was very sad what had happened"
and he didn't wanna speak about anything else. And so that was that.
We weren't able to entirely piece together their itinerary.
They landed in New Delhi and then they went to jaipur,
and we did know that their next destination was hyderabad.
They had said that they were going to open an orphanage
and a picture had emerged on Reddit
showing this orphanage.
And so the question was, "is the orphanage real?
Does it exist?"
And indeed it did exist.
With their names on the red sign,
their names were inside as well.
Their plans were to spend two hours there
and turn around, uh, and leave.
Two hours was a relatively short amount of time
to, to book for something like that.
[Engine starting]
[Nathan] For me, the big question was,
"what happened in the hospital?"
We had a statement from the hospital,
but what we did not have was a really sort of detailed view into what had taken place.
And so we wanted to find the doctor.
Gerry cotten had frequent episodes of vomiting and watery stools.
Doctors said at first they thought it was just traveler's diarrhea,
which is very common, of course, in India.
He said, uh, Jennifer robertson
spent the night in the hospital with him
and in the following day he had been booked for an ultrasound.
As he was booked for the ultrasound
he started experiencing what the doctor described as restlessness
and a shortage of breath.
They were worried about a rupture
or something else in his intestine.
Things went downhill very, very quickly.
[Beeping]
[Nathan] He had a heart attack. He was revived.
[Beeping]
[Nathan] And he had another heart attack and they revived him.
And then he had a third heart attack, and they couldn't revive him.
[Beeping stops]
And, uh, he died within about 25 hours
of them touching down in jaipur.
He died within about 25 hours of them touching down in jaipur.
Dramatic.
When it's coming out both ends it's almost always an infection.
What crohn's disease is, it's when the immune system is inappropriately turned on
and causing damage to the bowel.
From the story that we heard it sounds
as if something catastrophic happened
like he had a perforation in his bowel
and then an acquired infection.
The doctor seemed quite troubled by the whole thing.
Uh, he said he, he made clear
that he'd been running through this again and again and again.
The doctor had come to the conclusion
about what was the most likely cause of death.
One of the things that happens with crohn's disease
is this possibility of a perforation
and that can lead very rapidly to sepsis.
[Brian] But now we're assuming that's what happened there.
He may just had a cardiac arrest.
It is obviously very, um, uncommon that someone,
um, at that age without any other cardiac
or respiratory problems
would have not survived that event.
But if they weren't properly resuscitated,
then certainly that... Something like that
could've led to, to one's demise.
[Nathan] I spoke with the police.
He said, "as far as I'm concerned,
this was a natural death. There was no autopsy."
Why was there no autopsy, doc?
You do that in a case where there are suspicions about what might've happened.
I actually even showed Dr. Sharma
pictures of Gerry cotten and said, "is this... Is this the guy?"
And he said, "yes."
And everywhere I went,
anyone that had a record of, of Gerry cotten
had photocopies of his passport as well.
I certainly didn't meet anyone who thought that the death was faked.
There was a tourist that had died and
at the time nobody had really asked any questions.
I suppose if you look at this stripped of all the questions that emerged later
you can look at this as just a horrifically sad 24-48 hours,
uh, for a newly married couple.
[David] Reputable journalists have spoken to the doctor and so on,
and think his story is good.
But I think it would be ridiculous not to have doubts about it.
We're talking about quite a lot of money.
There's quite enough money to bribe absolutely everybody in all the chain and
quadriga were not shy about blowing cash.
I mean, it happens really quick.
He gets sick on the 8th, he's dead on the 9th.
You know, he's on a plane back to Canada on the 10th.
Um, the services are on the 14th.
It's, uh, apparently from what we know closed casket.
Um, Jennifer robertson is the executer, so she makes that decision.
[Nathan] There were a few more questions.
Uh, one was what had... what had happened with the body?
Because it was a closed casket funeral
and so people were asking questions about, "was there actually a body?
What's happening?"
And so we also wanted to speak with the embalmer.
So we walk into this office and this woman,
Dr. Seynara is sitting there,
and we said, "hey, we're here, you know, trying to understand
a little bit about what happened
to a Canadian man who died here." She's like, "oh."
She's like, "yes, yes, they brought the body here
and I refused to embalm it." And we were like, "what?"
The embalmer thought that the circumstances were fishy
because as she recalled a representative of the hotel had come,
which she found very strange.
Normally the body would come by ambulance,
normally the communication would come directly from the hospital.
And when she asked what had happened
she was given only a sort of a very cursory description of what had happened.
She's like, "well, this is very, very strange."
And so she said no.
She suggested they take the body to the sms medical college.
It's a place where the police are often present
and so she said, "take the body there."
And so that's where we went next.
We walked in and the first thing we walk along this hall
and the first thing we see, we see a sign for anatomy department,
which is what we're looking for
and we see this doorway that has, uh, two skeletons,
both of which have what appear to be ping pong balls
in the eye sockets and on top of it there's a sign,
appears to all but made out of human bones.
Um... which is like, "okay, that's a little Addams family."
Then we wanted to see the records.
So they came back with just this very, kind of thin dossier
and it showed they had photocopies of his passport
and it also showed the people who had dropped off
and taken the body was people who worked for the hotel.
Where the body had been in between? I don't know.
I would think it would be a very strange thing
for a luxury hotel to bring a body onto its premises,
but there's not very much that's normal about this story.
Nobody's seen the body. So is this really Gerald?
Nobody really knows for sure.
[Ryan] I'm not convinced he faked his death,
but I'm also not convinced that he's dead.
I'm 80% sure that he's dead.
75% sure.
You know, people just don't believe that he's dead.
They wanna see a picture, they want DNA.
Lawyers want the rcmp to exhume the body
of quadrigacx founder Gerald cotten.
[Amy] The now 76,000 creditors are pushing
the royal Canadian mounted police to dig up Gerald's body
soon because it's already been in the ground for over a year.
[David] If it isn't Gerry, then
it's obvious disappear and fake your death
and if it is Gerry, then we have to ask could he have been attacked?
Murdered? Poisoned?
I'm here with the crew of the deadliest catch.
It's pretty stormy out here and the wind is really picking up.
Gerry was definitely very paranoid
as the public face of an exchange.
He spoke at a couple of conferences,
and he seemed very paranoid about getting kidnapped.
I better get inside.
The captain's orders and he said that it's just too rough out,
I could fall overboard.
[David] This is a massive, massive scheme
that came unraveled and you have to think,
how much money would it take to kill Gerry cotten?
Would $200 million be enough?
I think Gerry is the only one with the whole story.
[Amy] There's so many open questions, you know?
It's just a beautiful example of the rampant fraud and scams in the industry.
[Alexandra] People are still convinced that,
you know, they took the money and ran.
But I feel like after that osc report came out
it's pretty clear that the money had already been long spent. It's gone.
[Joe] My theory is they kind of stumbled into a real business
because it coincided with the bitcoin boom
and they had a functioning exchange on their hands,
but in the end Gerry treated it like one of his old scams.
[Alexandra] If you could interview any one person, who would it be?
Probably Jen.
[David] What little they've recovered
plus all of Jennifer robertson's
quadriga boats, houses and so forth
will be sold and redistributed to the creditors
and they'll get cents on the dollar.
To find out that your husband wasn't who you thought he was the whole time,
I mean, she gave everything back, so...
I think the only thing she kept was her wedding ring.
Yeah. It's sad.
[Amy] We know that the whole thing was a fraud. Who else was involved?
2016, when patryn steps out of the picture,
did patryn step out of the picture?
Did they talk about the exit scam with patryn?
How much he's involved in it? We don't know.
I don't buy the story that the money is gone.
There's somewhere around $100 million that's just unaccounted for.
Just, you know, sent in directions
that are difficult to continue following.
I, uh, I think that someone still breathing, um, has control over it
and so long as that person continues to breathe
there's a chance that they make mistakes.
[Taylor] If all of the clues that are on the Internet,
if all the insights come from the Internet,
then the person that's mostly left to solve it
is someone who really, deeply understands the Internet.
[Tong] People are looking for answers
and people want justice and I think what most people
in the telegram group want is not just their money back,
but they wanna see justice served.
We cannot have a $200 million fraud
just happen and everyone go, "lol, whatever."
[Amber] It's not just regulation, it has to be effective regulation
and part of it is I think we need more and better enforcement.
If someone is getting punched or stabbed or shot,
that's going to take precedence
over somebody losing a few dollars or many dollars,
and I understand that,
but on some level if we never investigate these things,
if we never prosecute these things,
they're going to keep happening.
[Tense music playing]
[Upbeat music playing]
[Ryan] Oh, I hope he's alive. Yeah, I hope so.
I hope he's alive and we get him, and we get our money back
but a perfect world, I'd like them to find Gerry cotten
sitting on a beach and lock him up.
[Taylor] Where's the money, Gerry?
Where's the money and will we ever know?
♪ You think I was fooling you ♪
♪ well you're only fooling yourself ♪
♪ cause I'm gone with the money ♪
♪ I'm gone with the money ♪
♪ You were looking for the code ♪
♪ now you're in the hole ♪
♪ I'm gone with the money ♪