He befriended Cotten in 2016 in Toronto, where Cotten had moved during the effort to take Quadriga public. The couple's relationship began in 2014 when Robertsonswiped right on Cotten's Tinder profile. She decided that his involvement might mean that Quadriga was legitimate after all. Gox abruptly suspended operations, claiming that hackers had stolen $473 million from customer accounts. We now know that Cotten began, no later than 2015, to steal his clients funds. When Patryn told a stupid joke that nobody found funny, Cotten would burst into wild laughter. The chat is also frequented by journalists, detectives from the FBI and RCMP, and several of the targets of the ongoing criminal investigations, including Patryn, whose exact whereabouts have been unknown for about a year. It was also revealed that Cotten had written his will just four days before leaving for India. When it came to the case of the missing Quadriga millions, however, the balance was reversed. The media dragged Gerald Cotten's wife, Jennifer Robertson, into the spotlight after his mysterious death. Just days before they left, Cotten made out a will, leaving everything to Robertson, except for $100,000 he left to take care of his two dogs. He had seemed to appear in Vancouver out of thin air. Under the Mastermind Theory, Cotten ran Quadriga much as he had S&S Investments and its successors, honoring enough withdrawal requests to maintain credibility. Jennifer Robertson - WikiAlpha How could a seemingly healthy young man die suddenly from complications with Crohn's disease? They traced the relationship back to 2003, to a dingy warren of a website called TalkGold. Most people, a year after his death, already have. The whisper campaign likely began after Ryan Mueller, who conducted oversight for a third-party processor in Vancouver, was asked to review Quadrigas application. It didn't take long for the withdrawals to become greater than Quadriga's profits. She appeared with him, and even introduced him, at conferences. While I warned people privately, I wasnt shouting it from the rooftops. The Story Behind QuadrigaCX and Gerald Cotten, Netflix's - CoinDesk As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. 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. "I just really hated the questions, like, it seemed that I should have known," Robertson told CBC's Andrew Chang. She attributed that to a failed marriage and not liking her birth name (Griffith). 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. Not least due to the fact that allegedly only Cotten knew the passwords to the cold wallets worth nearly $ 190 million. Cotten provided withdrawals manually, seeming to give preference to the customers who complained loudest in public forums. "Whenever people put their money into the exchange, he sort of used it as his personal slush fund," she said. He was busy. He would have new names and passports, perhaps a new face. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. It was devoted to high-yield investment programs, or HYIPs, more commonly known as Ponzi schemes. Now recruiting: Nova Scotia starts testing foreign-trained family doctors, Meet the student who went straight from a Kenyan refugee camp to Acadia, Home repair program in Yarmouth County aims to patch gaps in getting help, CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices. The following year it launched a bid to be listed on the Canadian stock exchange, submitting to a full financial audit. Gerry appeared to have taken full control, says Andrew Wagner. Unsolved crimes attract amateur detectives, who canvass the internet for clues. Over several dozen hours of sailing lessons, the yacht dealer learned a few things about his customer. Four desks in a weird room, no business operations going on. Cotten was a computer nerd who had entered the right business at the right time and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Cotten said he had a helicopter license and offered to take Salkeld on a ride. He was always smiling, really friendly, offering stuff, says Alex Salkeld, a member of the original Vancouver Bitcoin circle. Gerald Cotten and Quadriga: Unraveling Crypto's Biggest Mystery Patryn told reporters after Cottens death that they had met online over five years ago, but this was about as accurate as calling himself an adviser to Quadriga when in fact he had been the cofounder. Midas Gold, which had begun to accept Bitcoin, was seized too. Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. A year before his death he sent a colleague a photograph taken in the kitchen of his Kelowna home. 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.". In some exits, the operator simply vanishes with the funds. Most of these early acolytes were drawn to the digital currencys libertarian ethos, its promises of decentralization, transparency, speed, and independence from governments and financial institutions. The strangely familiar nightmare of impeaching Trump Clues to the identity of Anonymous, who wrote the explosive White House op-ed Former Fox News staffers demand to be released from their NDAs Why crypto-crooks have their sights set on Iceland A sustained booing reveals Trumps true face From the archive: A portrait of Kim Jong Un, part man, part myth. He had to resort to increasingly questionable practices in a desperate effort to salvage his dream. Amidturmoil in the cryptocurrency market, Cotten and Robertson got married and decided to travel to Jaipur, India, for their honeymoon. Cotten returned for lessons the following summer, though not as often. Seasick marine biologist, turned journalist. But within a month after Cottens reported death, blockchain investigators proved that nearly all of the inaccessible wallets were empty. Furthermore, Gerry signed his will less than two weeks before his death, leaving all of his assets to Jennifer. He saw himself as an enforcerof rules, of integrity, of loyalty. This is a question that the lead investigator for the FBIs cybercrime division, Jennifer Vander Veer, has posed to crypto experts. The cautionary tales of fortunes lost because of misplaced private keys have the quality, in Bitcoin mythology, of the homilies delivered at religious gatherings.