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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.
The rest of them are likely involved too. Since there is no way that company could run if all transactions had to be done via its CEO and the CEO leaves for India, and nobody raises a red flag, and somehow the company can continue to run without access to its funds, and no financial books, and so on.... lots of red flags with the whole operation.
He'll be found and arrested soon enough. He won't be dead, and won't be in India. He'll be in Canada or the USA not far from his wife.
When I RFTA, I see that Cotton died in India - how was this verified?
If I were an investor, I would want DNA proof that he was dead otherwise, I would think Interpol should be notified to start looking for him.
$137M disappears eight months before the only person with the password dies?
It could be criminally inept business practices or just simply criminal. I would look at the latter scenario.
Yeah, the actual subject of the confirmation of his death is weirdly absent from the reporting.
If he actually died they would have shipped the body back to Canada and had a funeral. Even if it were a family-only affair that would be pretty damn easy for a reporter to confirm and put an end to all the speculation.
The only article I've seen is this which states:
Despite a death certificate from Indian authorities and a statement of death from a Nova Scotia funeral home, an Indian police document giving permission to Robertson to transport Cotten’s body back to Canada, and confirmation from the hospital in which Cotten died about the circumstances surrounding his death, many of Quadriga’s users refuse to believe he is actually dead.
So if they had permission to transport the body back to Canada then where's the funeral or at least the Canadian funeral home who cremated it?
I'm not one for conspiracy theories... but I'm inclined to believe he's still alive.
I stole this Sig
Forged death certificates are fairly easy to get in India and not particularly expensive - might not've even got a real doctor, just a professional document forger. The thing is in India, record-keeping can be quite poor and sometimes the easiest way to get a document is just to get a forgery. A guy I knew was applying for a security clearance in Australia and needed a birth certificate. He'd somehow lost or damaged it, and the hospital where he was born had burned down with all its records, so he couldn't get a replacement. His dad went to a professional forger, gave him all the details, and got a convincing replacement. Aus DFAT accepted it without issues and he got his clearance. In this case there was no falsified information involved, but I imagine most forgers wouldn't bother to verify the information at all.