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QuadrigaCX's Crypto Accounts Were Emptied Months Before CEO's Mysterious Death, Putting Fate of $137 Million In Doubt (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Millions of dollars were missing when the CEO of a crypto exchange died without sharing the passwords to his accounts. Investigators recently cracked his laptop -- only to find the money was gone. Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, was thought to have had sole access to the funds and coins exchanged on it. After his death in December, his colleagues said that about $137 million in cryptocurrency belonging to about 115,000 customers was held offline in "cold storage" and inaccessible. The case has sparked numerous theories, including that Cotten faked his own death and ran off with the cash. A court-appointed auditor, Ernst & Young, was able to crack Cotten's laptop and found that the accounts were emptied in April, eight months before his death, it said in a report last week.
The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials. Ernst & Young also said it found 14 user accounts linked to Cotten that traded on Quadriga's exchange and withdrew cryptocurrency to addresses not tied to Quadriga. Burdened with $190 million in debt and unable to find or access the money, Quadriga filed for creditor protection in late January. A Nova Scotia court threw the company a lifeline this week, granting it a 45-day extension that prevents creditors from filing lawsuits against it until mid-April.
The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials. Ernst & Young also said it found 14 user accounts linked to Cotten that traded on Quadriga's exchange and withdrew cryptocurrency to addresses not tied to Quadriga. Burdened with $190 million in debt and unable to find or access the money, Quadriga filed for creditor protection in late January. A Nova Scotia court threw the company a lifeline this week, granting it a 45-day extension that prevents creditors from filing lawsuits against it until mid-April.
"So, you decided to invest in fake crypto-crime money and trusted it's safe keeping with a stranger..."
It seems that the primary function of cryto-currencies is to make bank robberies easier to do and more difficult to trace.
Well the whole point of crypto is that you can hold it securely yourself without having to rely on third parties, so trusting it to a third party is stupidity on the part of the user not an inherent problem of crypto.
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Can someone explain how the 8 months old "withdrawal" is only seen now and required hacking the computer.
Isn't the point of the blockchain you can trace (except through mixers or specific ZKP systems) transactions precisely because every node holds an exact and full copy of the ledger of transactions?
The only thing hacking the computer could provide is private keys to actually transfer value out of those wallets but the balance should have been public.
Here's the relevant part of the summary:
It seems it should be easy to tell from the public blockchain where the coins were transferred to, how many, and when....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.