Front Burner - Introducing: A Death in Cryptoland

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

When the young CEO of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is reported to have died while honeymooning in India, it sets off a cataclysmic chain of events that would leave about 76,000 people out of a quarter of a billion dollars and a trail of conspiracy theories around whether Gerald Cotten is dead or alive. A Death in Cryptoland is an original podcast series about a crypto-tycoon, his secret past, his sudden demise, and an online sleuth’s obsession to unravel the truth behind QuadrigaCX. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/cryptoland

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, everybody. So we have a very special bonus episode today. It's the first episode of the new CBC Podcast, A Death in Cryptoland. When the young CEO of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange is reported to have died while honeymooning in India, it sets off this cataclysmic chain of events. Nearly 80,000 people would lose more than a quarter of a billion dollars and theories around whether Gerald Cotton is actually dead or alive would grow. Dive into the world of this mysterious crypto tycoon, his secret past,

and an online sleuth's obsession to unravel the truth behind Quadriga. A Death in Cryptoland is hosted by Takara Small. We've got the first episode. Please have a listen. On a warm, hazy December day in 2018, hotel staff from one of India's fanciest resorts make their way from the lush grounds of the Oberoi Rajvilas to the clogged streets of Jaipur to a hospital. The hotel has a request. Kind of a big one, really. Will the doctor accept a body for embalming? It's a man. A Canadian.

He's died from a cardiac arrest, but they can't tell her much else. Dr. Simi Miura is weirded out by this. Why would a hotel bring me a body and not an ambulance? How come this corpse is not in the hands of the hospital where he died? And so she said, I think there's something fishy here. This is Nathan Vanderklip, the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail newspaper. And then she starts talking about the fishy circumstances, and she used that word fishy quite a number of times. And so, yeah, you know, very deeply strange.

The doctor refuses to embalm the body. Try elsewhere, she says. And so they do. This time, finding a doctor willing to do the job. And so they do. This time, finding a doctor willing to do the job. What's not clear is how exactly this deceased man gets from one facility to the next. Who moves it?

But what we do know is the next hospital does not have the same concerns as Dr. Simi Meera. Neha Punia is a journalist for the CBC in Delhi. All they said to me was we went ahead and embalmed his body without really telling me whether they identified him, saying that they had a death certificate, they had a police clearance, and that's all they needed. The death would be reported around the globe. Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. Fans of the digital currency Bitcoin say they love

it because it's secure, but investors in a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange are in a bind. They have this account worth 190 million US dollars. Thousands of investors have money in there, but only one person had the password and he died. The company's 30-year-old founder, Gerald Cotton, died unexpectedly in December in India. Quadriga CX left thousands of its customers with frozen accounts. And no one can access them. Quadriga, the biggest exchange of cryptocurrencies. Quadriga CX's 30-year-old founder, Gerald Cotton. A astonishing story raises all sorts of questions about cryptocurrency.

This is the peculiar story of Gerald Cotton. It's a strange and shifting tale about his sudden demise, his company, and the disappearance of more than a quarter of a billion dollars. It's about a secret past, hidden identities, and shadowy associations. My God, he was just like he was a kid playing a game. It just kind of spiraled out of control. It's about a young man who touted a new kind of currency, digital, the future of money. He peddled the idea that Bitcoin would revolutionize how we live. The Bitcoin community is trying to move away from the traditional forms of currency

and into this modern digital currency. And it's kind of like we the people for the people. Yeah, exactly. It's pretty much money by people for people. Buy people for people. Over its short life, Quadriga CX would attract hundreds of thousands of customers from all over the world. It was a Canadian company, so people thought it was safe. I think they started resorting to very shady methods of moving money. Dread that just fills you with horror at the thought that you have lost that amount of money. We're about to take you down a virtual trail

to see what really happened at Quadriga CX. The curious circumstances around its creation, its collapse, and why, more than two years later, conspiracy theories persist as to whether Jerry Cotton is dead or alive. There are deep oddities in this case. Does somebody who appears to be in reasonable health, who is young, do they die that quickly? Exhumed the freaking body, checked the DNA if there's DNA there, and let's go from there. So we can all sit there and go, okay, yeah, he's dead. Well, fuck no, he's not dead. Well, then let's go find him.

Well, fuck no, he's not dead. Well, then let's go find him. I'm Takara Small, and this is A Death in Cryptoland. Chapter One The Body The body. The first time the word Bitcoin came across my desk was around 2013. I was working as an online editor in a Toronto newsroom, and from the stories I was editing, I could see early adopters were making some pretty good cash from it.

I wanted to know more, so I contacted Kujiga. It was an exchange which allowed people to trade money for digital currencies like Bitcoin. I wanted to open an account, but they asked for a lot of personal information, including two pieces of picture ID. And I didn't feel comfortable just handing that over, so I changed my mind. Had I gone for it, though, I might have become fabulously wealthy in 2017. Mind you, I also might have gone broke in 2019.

In the early days, Jerry Cotton appeared to be a Bitcoin nerd with a dream. He'd arrived in Vancouver with his co-founder, Michael Patron, and launched Quadriga in late 2013. And over the next few months, Jerry was getting noticed around town. And today we are joined by Jerry Cotton from the director of Bitcoin Co-op, the founder of QuadrigaCX.com, and the owner of SecondBitcom ATM in Vancouver. He even gets invited on this podcast called True Bromance. It was described as a place to talk about life and whatever else happens in this insane world. So I'm guessing they thought, what the hell?

Invite that Bitcoin guy. How about we rewind and let's get to your story. So when did you start and what was happening? I'm 25. And let me paint the picture. Mr. Cotton looks probably exactly what you think an internet genius would look like. A young, attractive man. It's exactly what you picture in your mind.

That's Michael Richards there with that very flattering description. He was one of the three hosts. Yeah, that was me. I used to paint the picture of the guest for the people that were, for all of our guests, for the people that were listening. My producer spoke to Michael by video from Vancouver. He still seems like a bro. Jerry struck him as a good person. He seemed like a sweet guy. Like, I don't think I remember him being any sort of weird guy. He seemed like kind of a small, soft-spoken guy from what I remember.

And really nice. I remember him being really nice and really generous with his time and explaining this thing to us who we didn't know anything about, you know, Bitcoin. So just imagine, there they are, the bros, recording in one of their apartments in Vancouver. Apparently, a roommate has been sent to his room to keep things quiet. They're drinking and they're trying to wrap their heads around cryptocurrency. I was doing some research because I knew you were coming this week. And I was, to be honest, I got more confused doing the research than I had been.

So the Bitcoin itself is explained, the way I heard it explained, was that it's basically like the internet. And the host is wondering if people are actually out there selling these crypto things. So Jerry patiently explains that Bitcoin itself isn't a physical thing. We're kind of promoting a new way of thinking of how money works. Instead of using traditional currency, which is basically antiquated. Antiquated. Antiquated, that's what I was looking for. For a guy who drew on antiquity to name his company,

there's something kind of funny about Jerry stumbling on that word. Quadriga is a name for an ancient chariot pulled by four horses. It symbolizes victory. Triumph. For Jerry, Bitcoin seems to have been his golden ticket. He embraced it in 2011, he told the bros. Up until then, it hadn't really caught on. No one was really doing it. It was a few

people on the internet. Unfortunately, I didn't really get into it as early as I wish I had of. I mean, a total conspiracy nut was the one who actually told me about it, and I didn't really take him seriously. Like you, I read about it and thought, this is ridiculously complicated. Right. And I really didn't explore it much further until a few months down the road, when I noticed the price going up and when I started seeing the news a bit more. Jerry described himself as a trader, as though it were the stock market. He told them he'd been doing quite a bit of arbitrage. What is arbitrage? Sorry. 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. Right. Okay. You exploit discrepancies in prices. Exactly. So you'd have... That sounds like a good deal. It's quite the pitch.

Just buy low on one exchange, sell high on another. And how many coins did you buy at a time like this? Oh, like hundreds or so. Really? It was very profitable in November. Are we hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg right now? Is that what's going on? Unfortunately not.

My producer Enza asked Michael what kind of impression he'd been left with about Quadriga. They were doing weird things with computers and making money. I just remember thinking it was kind of hokey, the whole thing. While one of you was asking, I don't know if it was you, about who's your clientele? Who are your clients? Serbian hitmen? Was that you? Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think that was our impression that it was all sort of, yeah, shady and kind of back rooms and not, you know, not something that necessarily I wanted to be involved in, obviously. For lots of other folks in Vancouver, though, the arrival of Jerry and his business partner

Michael Patron signaled something quite different. Quadriga would help the community promote this new currency and get it into the mainstream. It was a thriving scene, something that Jerry and Michael would have known and surely would have played into their decision to set up shop in Vancouver. Andrew Wagner was a big part of that community. He got to know both of Quadriga's founders. Hello, you've reached Andrew Widener. I can't come to the phone right now. My producers Enza and Joan have gone out to a suburb of Vancouver to meet him. Andrew doesn't always pick up his phone. He's more likely to use an encrypted messaging app for privacy. A couple of minutes later, Andrew emerges from his building.

Hey, how's it going? Andrew, nice to meet you. He's got mopish brown hair and a tidy beard. He's wearing a Henry David Thoreau t-shirt. He invented civil disobedience. You know, people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi read and quoted Thoreau. Andrew describes himself as kind of a hippy-dippy sort of libertarian. He was helping run the local Bitcoin co-op when Jerry and Michael came to town.

At the time, Andrew was trying to get as many businesses as possible to adopt Bitcoin as a form of payment. And it sounds like he was pretty persuasive. One merchant he convinced was a tattoo parlor. Yeah, so I was kind of drunk that day and I kind of walked in there and I said, if you accept Bitcoin, I will get a Bitcoin tattoo and, and we'll put you in the newspaper. And that's pretty much how it went down. Andrew turned up on the front page of a local weekly. His sleeve pulled up, revealing that Bitcoin symbol inked on his left shoulder.

A capital B with two lines coming out the top and two out the bottom. Like a dollar sign. Set inside a padlock to represent how secure the system is. These were the heady days in Vancouver. It was a community of nerds, Andrew says. Two kinds. There's the ideologically motivated nerds and the nerds who like money. Andrew is an ideologue, a true believer.

He sees cryptocurrencies as a way to help political causes. It cuts out the banks, a kind of stick-it-to-the-man philosophy. Jerry's philosophy, though, was harder to read. Jerry tried to not let it be known whether he was an ideologue or just business-minded. I often got a sense that he was business-minded because if someone said something in a meeting that was funny, like, oh yeah, that businessman doesn't know what he's talking about, or like a funny, sly way of making money, Gerald was more likely to laugh at jokes like that. He clearly had his head in thinking of ways to get rich, but he didn't go out of his way to advertise it as much as others

did. But if someone else made comments like that, you could tell his face would light up. Andrew thought Jerry and Michael made for an odd pair. Jerry was like the protege, or like a little brother taking along. I never chilled with him much. He seemed like he was intentionally trying to inflate Mike's ego all the time, laughing at his jokes, just being a yes man, and I found it icky. In fact, a lot of people found them an unlikely duo. Jerry was the smiley CEO, and Michael was a serious guy with tattoos and an interest in martial arts. Andrew found Michael to be helpful.

He shared what he knew about Bitcoin and trading. He was nice to all of us. I describe him as generous, although his generosity was kind of an ego thing at times. He liked to think of himself as an important person or a helper. But he was a complicated man. You know, he made it clear that he was not to be fucked with. It was a big thing for the crypto crowd that the company began sponsoring the co-op's events. It was a symbiotic relationship, Andrew says.

They needed Quadriga, a seemingly safe homegrown exchange, and Quadriga wanted the publicity the Bitcoin nerds were generating. Gerald Cotton and Michael Patron opened a small office in one of Vancouver's oldest neighborhoods called Gastown. From what people say, there wasn't a lot to it. Just basic stuff.

A few tables, those ubiquitous steel fold-up chairs, some computer equipment. It was there that in early 2014, Kudriga launched a Bitcoin ATM machine. It would have been a big deal, but months before, their rival, the Bitcoiniacs, had unveiled the world's first. Media from around the globe turned out. had unveiled the world's first. Media from around the globe turned out. For Kudriga, though, one of the Bitcoin nerds filmed it, Alex Sakheld.

He liked Jerry, so he brought his kids down for the opening and offered to make a video. Maybe it'd be cool if I put a little video up of you helping my kids use the ATM, because I'm going to do it anyway. You know, make a little video that's like, isn't this cool? Like, Bitcoin's so easy easy kids can do it. No checking your identity when you're a child, right? You know, jokes like that. Like my kid can now send money across the world and she doesn't even know what money is.

And she's still in a diaper. Okay, so first you push start. You can see Jerry standing over the toddler, pointing to the button she needs to press. Hit it, got it, hit it. Start button up there. He instructs her little sister too. See Jerry standing over the toddler, pointing to the button she needs to press. Start cutting up there. He instructs her little sister too. Her diaper hangs out of her red pants.

Now put in the money. You can see her guiding a $100 bill into the machine. Again! Yeah, so the cutest kids ever using a Bitcoin ATM. You know, a few people watched it and Jerry was nice enough to walk them both through it. And yeah, posted the video and it didn't really catch on. What Alex couldn't have known then was that in just a few years, that little video would get watched by people all over the world.

Looking for a glimpse of the man who'd run Quadriga CX. Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups.

So it was back in late 2017 when I really began to kick myself for not having bought Bitcoin. In just one year, the price of Bitcoin soared from about $900 to $20,000. Quadriga appeared to have become a fairy tale. Fortunes were being made. So is this recording good? Because I have a bit of an echo. Because of COVID, we're talking to a lot of people virtually, making them tech their own interviews. Let's begin with your name and who you are. Okay. All right. That's the question? Yes. So can you tell me your name and who you are? Just a little bit about yourself.

Can you tell me your name and who you are? Just a little bit about yourself. Sure. It's Amy Castor, and I am an independent reporter. I do a lot of writing about cryptocurrency and blockchain. She's also written a lot about Quadriga. In mid-December 2017, the price of Bitcoin was almost $20,000. Nobody had ever seen that before. $20,000. Nobody had ever seen that before. It was a spectacular run up. A lot of money was flowing into the exchange before then. Everybody wanted to get into cryptocurrency, hoping they could make money for nothing, right? Jerry Cotton and Michael Patron could hardly have believed it. When the company started out, the price of a Bitcoin was a few hundred dollars. At this point, Jerry is spending money at a stunning rate. So here's what happened.

In October 2018, he got married to a woman called Jennifer Robertson, who he just happened to be buying up a lot of properties with. Starting in 2016, the two would purchase 16 properties, waterfront, row houses, even an island off Canada's East Coast. But I mean, he spent millions of dollars buying his own assets, cars, a yacht, an airplane, you know, going on these lavish vacations. So he just did whatever he wanted. And Jerry wasn't very modest about it. he wanted.

And Jerry wasn't very modest about it. In texts between him and a co-worker, which were leaked online, Jerry bragged that he had traveled to a whole bunch of places. He says, In total, I'm up to 56 countries that I've been to. 37 with Jen.

And that airplane Amy mentioned? It just sat parked at an airstrip near Halifax. Denise Sibley has been the manager there since late 2017. We had planes with leather seats, but his leather seat was nicer. And, you know, his avionics was nicer. And the plane was a whitish with a fancy blue color on it. And I just remember always referring to it as the Cadillac of Cessna. She was so smitten with this plane, she used to take pictures of it against the backdrop

of a nice sunrise or sunset. But in all the time she worked at the club, she never once laid eyes on Jerry. So he became a figure of some fascination for her. I mean, who buys a plane and never flies it? We found out that this guy was a businessman, lived locally, and by locally I mean close to Halifax. He traveled all over the world. We just didn't know much about him. And then we kind of did the Google searches and we talked to people and figured out that he was into some kind of

cryptocurrency thing. It all seemed very mysterious. Now, bear in mind, Denise is a huge fan of true crime books, so a lot of things seem suspicious to her. Nevertheless, the intrigue was only heightened by the fact that Jerry was almost impossible to reach. He owed fees. Not a lot, but enough that she wanted them. I had texted him and he didn't answer, and I called him. And I said, I've been trying to get a hold of you. And he said, I don't answer numbers I don't know. I remember thinking, but you're a businessman. Like, if I didn't answer numbers I didn't know at a flying club,

I wouldn't have any students. But he was polite and gracious, she says. And he paid up. Like if I didn't answer numbers I didn't know at a flying club, I wouldn't have any students. But he was polite and gracious, she says. And he paid up. In subsequent months, they repeated that dance, always about what he owed. In one conversation with me, he told me about his trip to India. And I'm like, oh, wow. Jerry told her he was going for the opening of an orphanage he was sponsoring. I kind of was like gobsmacked by that because I thought, how cool is that?

He also seems to have shocked his operations manager, Aaron Matthews, when at the beginning of a work week in late 2018, he greeted him in a text saying, Happy Monday. I've left and I'm on my honeymoon trip. I'm in India. It's 11 p.m. here. Jesus, lol. I never in India. It's 11 p.m. here. Jesus, lol. I never knew, was the response. The honeymoon seems to have begun well. It was the end of November 2018 and Jerry and Jennifer did what most tourists in India do. They made a beeline for the city of Agra,

snapping a selfie in front of the Taj Mahal. And Jerry's still running his multi-million dollar business there, off his laptop. At one point, he writes to say he's sitting next to the river Ganges, and Aaron asks if that's the river they wash their dead in. Jerry corrects him, explaining they cremate the bodies on the banks. I saw like 10 bodies today, he writes, adding

huge culture shock, lol. A few days later, Jerry and Jennifer would arrive in Jaipur. And within 24 hours, he'd be pronounced dead. Nathan Vanderclip he'd be pronounced dead. Nathan Vanderklip is with The Globe and Mail. He's based in Beijing.

He went to India in the weeks after Jerry's death was announced. The cause for intrigue, the cause for interest in this story, I think, is, you know, there's abundant causes for these sorts of things. Nathan spent time tracking down people and obtaining documents connected to those final hours. He was able to get surprising details, the kind that are normally hard to come by for journalists. Why would a police commissioner send me by WhatsApp copies of emails and copies of hotel check-in records? Why would they send me a detailed hospital report on the death?

I mean, why would any of these things happen? I mean, India is kind of a remarkable place, or it can be kind of a remarkable place for a journalist. On December 8th, 2018, Jerry and Jennifer landed in Jaipur. They're picked up from the airport and taken to the Oberoi Rajvilas Hotel, which sits on the ominously named Ghanar Road. Now I have to stress, this is no regular inn. In the hotel's promotional video, much of it shot by drone,

you kind of float over this vast area, a lush green forest. And smack dab in the center is what looks like a castle. As far as I can tell, it's just missing a moat. The room Jerry and Jennifer had booked cost more than $900 Canadian per night. The plan was to spend a few days there before heading south to a small village called Venkatapuram for the grand opening of the orphanage they were sponsoring. They donated to a California-based charity called Angel House, which, for about $21,000 U.S., allows a person to have an orphanage built in their name. Pictures that were shared later on social media show a low

concrete building with a red and black sign affixed above the entrance, which reads, Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotton Home, sponsored by Jennifer Robertson and Gerald Cotton. The pair would never get to see it in person. Almost immediately after checking in, Jerry says he's not feeling so good. And when he's there, he starts to complain. He says that he has some stomach pain. And a hotel doctor comes to see him, decides that there's not much that can be done for him at the hotel. And so he gets taken off to a place called the Fortis Escorts Hospital. So he gets taken off to a place called the Fortis Escorts Hospital.

It's a private hospital, one of the best in the city. And Jerry's admitted just before 10 p.m. With what the doctor called symptoms of acute gastroenteritis. The doctor, Jayant Sharma, also took note that Jerry had a history of Crohn's disease. And so there's vomiting. He said he had vomited 10 times, some back discomfort, was feverish. And initially, Jerry and Jennifer thought it was food poisoning. But then things change, and fast.

There's a moment the next day where he's meant to go for an ultrasound, and he starts to get short of breath. And his health seems to take quite a quick turn. He's said to be suffering from septic shock, and Jerry is taken to the intensive care unit. According to the hospital, in the mid-afternoon, Jerry goes into cardiac arrest, but they're able to resuscitate him. Then they put him on a ventilator. Then, the hospital said, there is a second cardiac arrest at 6.30 p.m., and that this time, Jerry couldn't be revived.

We wanted to talk to Dr. Sharma, but he didn't get back to us. And our colleague Neha in Delhi asked the hospital if we could speak to him. They said no. But back when Nathan talked to Dr. Sharma in early 2019, the doctor told him it bothered him how fast everything happened. He was struck by how

quickly this had all gone down. And he found the whole thing deeply unusual. The suddenness with which Jerry Cotton's situation turned. And so just before 7.30 p.m. on December 9th, 2018, Gerald Cotton, at the age of 30, was declared dead. Which brings us back to where we started, with hotel staff looking for an embalmer.

And remember, one doctor refuses to embalm because she's suspicious of taking a corpse from a hotel. But another goes ahead because there's a death certificate. One that misspells Jerry's name. Cotton with an A rather than with an E, which is the proper spelling. A slip of the hand? Probably. An oddity, though, that would feed conspiracy theories. Jennifer checked out of the Oberoi that same day, December 10th, and she let the orphanage know their visit wasn't going to happen. Jennifer sent an email to the orphanage saying that he had passed away,

saying he passed away from cardiac arrest, and Jennifer said, I'm bringing his body home to Canada. Jennifer flew back to Canada on December 11th, and it was around this time that Denise, the manager at the flying club, was trying to reach Jerry again. This time it wasn't about fees. Someone was interested in purchasing his plane. She got a call back, but it wasn't from Jerry. And I said, hello. And the person said, somebody was asking about Jerry Cotton's plane. And I go, oh, yeah, me. I was asking about Jerry Cotton's plane.

Well, you know, this is this is Jennifer Robertson and I'm his wife. Denise was momentarily confused. Why was she hearing from Jerry's wife? But she's a chatter. so she just carried on. And I said then, you know, how did it go with the orphanage, you know, and is he back sort of thing? And she goes, well, can I, you know, tell you something, share something? And I'm like, well, of course. And she goes, she was very soft spoken and she's like, Jerry passed away. And I'm like, what?

The company had not yet announced the death, and Jennifer asked her to keep it quiet. It was a shock. But Denise assured her that she could. Then she wanted to know what to do about the plane. Did Jennifer want to sell it? And she told Denise, yeah, she did. Denise Sibley used to work as a broadcaster at a local radio station, so keeping silent was going to be a tough ask. Especially because she and one of her co-workers used to get around

about how Jerry's life seemed to have all the makings of a thriller. What if something were to happen to this wildly wealthy young man? So hung up and I thought, this is weird. This is really weird. So I immediately called my chief flight instructor who I had shared, we had talked about how, you know, what if Jerry went away somewhere and he died? Like we always, I told you, we always kind of joked about it, but didn't really ever want anything to happen to anybody, obviously. And so I called him up. He goes, remember all the things we talked about? I said, Jerry Cotton is dead. And he goes, that's crazy. And I said, I know. And then he goes, what if he's not really dead? And I said, I know.

And as far as the public's concerned, Jerry won't really be dead for another month. Quadriga doesn't share the news of his passing until mid-January. Weeks earlier on December 14th, on a cool, crisp day in Halifax, a group of friends, co-workers, and family gathered for Jerry's funeral. We're told it was a closed casket service. We know some of the people who were there, but they won't do a taped interview with us. And then, when it's all done,

Quadriga carries on, business as usual. Looking at its Facebook page, no one would have guessed that the company's CEO was gone. In the days before Christmas, they posted, Happy Holidays from Quadriga CX. Please be advised that from December 24th to January 2nd, our team will be working on a reduced schedule with limited support. Just after Christmas, they announced the company is even expanding with a new store and more locations coming soon. But behind the scenes, nothing would have been particularly normal.

There is a scramble involving lawyers, contractors, and the man who built and maintained Quadriga's platform, Alex Hannon. He had flown in immediately from overseas. It was right around this time that a bizarre email landed in the inbox of the newsroom where Nick Day works. He's a tech reporter in New York working for Coindesk, a publication that specializes in digital currencies. Coindesk received an email from an anonymous third party saying, you know, Gerald Cotton had died. He, you know, the sender had been to Cotton's funeral. We were like, okay, well, this is like a crazy story, but we can't like completely ignore it. So we were just going

around trying to figure out what we could find out. Without any real details to go on, it was impossible to confirm. But Nick gave it his all. I emailed Cotton's address. I emailed his lawyer, you know, just trying to say like, hey, we got this weird email and we would like to verify it. We're not sure how to phrase this, but it says you passed away. And obviously we got no response. Then on January 14th, 2019, a message goes up on Quadriga's Facebook page.

This time it's not a greeting or a business update. It's a post from Jennifer. And she says, It is with a heavy heart that we announce the sudden passing of Gerald Cotton, co-founder and CEO of Quadriga CX, She tells people he died of complications from Crohn's disease, and that it all happened while opening an orphanage for children in need. And she adds, And she adds, Jerry cared deeply about honesty and transparency, and that he had unwavering commitment to his customers, employees, and family. She wraps it up expressing confidence that the leadership at Quadriga will carry on the work that Jerry began.

No, we were just like, oh, wow, like, this is like crazy. Like, you know, we were like, holy cow, like, this is crazy. We were like, holy cow, this is legit? Does that mean that all the other stuff that was in the email is also legit? The sender said that no one who worked at Quadriga had access to the exchange's funds. They couldn't access his laptop. Is Quadriga suddenly unable to access his funds? Does that mean people are out, you know, people no longer have access to their money? At that moment, Quadriga is holding customers' funds worth $290 million.

Next time on A Death in Crypto Land. You know, like there's so much to the story, like honeymoon, building an orphanage, another country, moving the body, like all the missing money, you know, they just kept coming out over time, like a sustained release of information. So it wasn't just like, oh, hey, these guys are gone and all the money's gone. It was like, but what happened? But what happened? A Death in Cryptoland is hosted by me, Takara Small, and written and produced by Joan Weber and Enza Uda. Eunice Kim is our associate producer. Sound design by Natasha Aziz and Graham McDonald.

Our digital producer is Emily Connell. Special thanks to Dave Downey, Cecil Fernandez, and Niha Punia. Legal advice by Sean Moorman and fact-checking by Emily Mathieu. Additional audio comes from NPR, BBC, CNN. Chris Oak is our senior producer and the executive producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. This has been the first episode of A Death in Crypto Land. You can listen to more episodes on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.