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Software Engineer Loses Life Savings in Quadriga Imbroglio (bloomberg.com)
Tong Zou wasn't a stereotypical crypto bro bent on accumulating flashy trophies such as Lamborghinis when he deposited his life savings into Quadriga CX's digital exchange. The 30-year-old software engineer, who'd been working in California for seven years, just wanted to save a few bucks on transfer fees after deciding to move to Vancouver. It proved to be a C$560,000 ($422,000) mistake. From a report: "It's all my savings, so I'm just living on what little I have left and trying to start over," Zou said in a phone interview Friday from Vancouver, where he has been living out of an AirBnB for the past month. "It pretty much took everything away from me." Zou is one of Quadriga's 115,000 clients who are out of luck after the sudden death of the firm's founder left C$190 million in cryptocurrencies protected by his passwords unretrievable. The exchange has halted operations and was granted protection from creditors on Feb. 5 in Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax.
Purely Devil's Advocate here, because I have no skin in the game.
The death certificate is from India. Say you're a shady guy in control of millions in cryptocurrency and you want to abscond with it ... how much will it cost you to buy that death certificate in India?
Is there a DNA tested body to prove this?
Lots about this sounds utterly sketchy to me, not the least of which is why this company was deemed to be trustworthy enough to hold onto that much of other people's money.
I don't think you have to be a tinfoil hat wearing nutter to understand that even the stuff the mainstream press is reporting sounds like they're not taking this at face value in terms of if it adds up.
This has literally gone from "trust us, the money is secure", and become "trust us, the money is all gone".
More succinctly, you shouldn't put all your eggs in a basket with no bottom.
It seems all(?) commenters here think, the owner is really died!
Look at how public interest in cryptocurrencies died (for a while now)!
Is it really hard to guess that the business was going bad for a while & the owner decided to runaway w/ all customer money, instead of declaring bankruptcy?
Why the owner decided to go to India? :-)
Supposedly, "to build an orphanage"!
Is it hard to guess he went there because it was cheap/easy to buy a fake dead certificate?
If he is really dead then where is the body?
Is anybody saw/verified the body?
"Deposited his life savings into Quadriga CX's digital exchange" were the stupidity keywords that convinced me not to feel sorry for him.
After all of the Bitcoin exchanges that have failed over the past few years, why do people still DO this?
When you buy a share through a brokerage account, do you own the underlying share, or does your broker own the underlying share, upon said institution you lay claim to your just portion as some kind of common creditor?
I suspect that's a distinction with a difference.
Also, in a conventional bank, the cash portion is often highly insured by the Great Revenue Service of the Public Good (precisely the institution this clown was attempting to shirk by hopping aboard an underground railway through the Great Digital Wild West).