Uncover - S12: "A Death in Cryptoland" E5: Where’s the Money Gerry?

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

As financial investigators struggle to find any of the missing quarter of a billion dollars, they begin to make some bizarre discoveries around how the exchange had operated — finding funny business from the very start. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764

It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle

and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. In early February 2019, a few weeks after Codrigo CX has announced Gerald Cotton is dead, a woman named Lindsay Jones finds herself in a trailer park on Canada's East Coast. Lindsay is a freelance journalist, and she's been asked by the Globe and Mail newspaper to check out an address. It was this trailer park behind a highway that it had trailers in rows and most of them were neatly kept. I mean, the homes were nice mobile homes.

They weren't dumps. And, you know, this house was clearly a dump. That's not very nice either. I think it was a real trailer trash experience. Is that a little too salacious for a CBC podcast? Now at first, Lindsay's thinking, am I in the wrong place? It seemed so off. But there's no mistake.

She's got the right spot. The Globe's business reporter Alexandra Posatzky had tracked it down months earlier, around the time CIBC had frozen over $26 million of Quadriga's funds. Remember, that's when customers were feeling anxious over the long delays getting their money. One of them had contacted Alexandra. He said, you know, this is very difficult, very stressful. I really want to get this money back. Would it help you at all if I gave you the name of the numbered company

that I was asked to send my money to? And I said, sure, I could look into that. It could help with my reporting. So he sent me the numbered company, and it was actually registered to Aaron Matthews and his wife. And I'd never heard of Aaron Matthews. And so I looked up the address that was on the registration and I found that it was this prefab home park in New Brunswick.

And this is the address where this user has been asked to send his money. And I just thought, that's really strange. Because at the time, I thought of Quadriga as very much a Vancouver entity. And here we have money being wired to this guy in New Brunswick. The next time Alexandra hears the name Aaron Matthews is after Jerry's reported death. I immediately was like, oh, Aaron Matthews, that's the guy people were, or at least this one person had sent money to. And then that's when we sent Lindsay to Aaron Matthews' home. Well, that was kind of an adventure for Lindsay.

of an adventure for Lindsay. So it was a dirty vinyl sided beige trailer. And what really stood out to me was at the mounted black security camera had a red light on it was pointing at the front door. And I found that really odd. And no one came to the door the first time I approached. And so I went around to the neighbors and asked about, do you know anyone who, do you know the people that live there? Do you know anything about them? The neighbors are helpful, offering up that, yeah, that's where Aaron Matthews and his wife were living. They both work from home and they receive a lot of packages.

So Lindsay goes back to see if anyone's home yet. Sure enough, there's a guy out front. A skinny dark-haired man in his 30s smoking on the front porch. And he was a scruffy looking guy and he had Tim Hortons coffee cup. There was, I noticed, a bottle of Raid and an empty can of Colt 45 sitting right there. And he said that he knows no one by the name of Aaron Matthews, and Aaron Matthews does not live there. And he begrudgingly almost like just throwing the name out there to appease me or sounded like he was making it up, just said, he's Jim, he's named Jim. Whether this was actually Aaron and his wife she met that day, she couldn't say.

But it sure seemed suspect. I asked, do you want to know why I'm here? Do you want to know why I'm asking these questions? And he said no. And I just found that incredibly suspicious behavior because most people like to know what's going on and why a reporter from a national newspaper And the man's obviously upset. He's visibly shaking and demands I leave the property. But what happens next, Lindsay still finds unnerving. But what happens next, Lindsay still finds unnerving.

So she sees a car in the driveway and she stops to take some pictures. Figures she can find out who owns the vehicle. Then all of a sudden, a woman rushes out of the trailer. She comes out of the house in a baseball hat, just screaming at me, like dropping F-bombs, telling me to stop taking pictures of her house. I said, I'm not doing anything illegal. I'm on public property. And she tells me that to wipe the smirk off my face or she'll punch me or something along those lines. So, you know, that was really rattling.

And I just tried, I just turned calmly. Well, I wasn't calm, but I walked to my car and I was just like, like trying to pretend I did not feel like she was going to run up behind me. Yeah. Like she really threatened to beat the shit out of me. And there's like no one around. I mean, I'm in the middle of nowhere, essentially by myself. And I guess I was with a male photographer, but he basically ran and hid. So I felt like it was just me.

There is no doubt the home was tied to the numbered company 700-964-NB. It was one of many so-called shadow banks Kodriga used to move hundreds of millions of dollars, registered in the name of Aaron Matthews and his wife. Aaron's the guy who was one of a handful of Quadriga contractors, Jerry's director of operations. He was in constant contact with Jerry. They were chatting every day almost.

He was kind of helping Jerry run the show. He was also the man who, following Jerry's untimely departure, had been tapped to be Quadriga's interim CEO. You know, people coming out and screaming and yelling at me. Like, if these people were in fact wrapped up in this company, then I think that fits the bill. these people were in fact wrapped up in this company, then I think that fits the bill.

If this was a glimpse behind the curtain, what else was behind Quadriga CX? I'm Takara Small, and this is A Death in Cryptoland, Chapter 5. Where's the money, Jerry? The initial narrative that was pushed forward was, oh, Gerald's dead. All the money's gone. This is Amy Castor, a freelance journalist in L.A. But that's because that he died holding the keys to the cold wallet storage where all the crypto assets are. And now they're locked and nobody can ever access those funds again. And what we learned later, that wasn't really what happened.

And what we learned later, that wasn't really what happened. You'll recall it was mid-January in 2019 when Quadriga announces Gerald Cotton has died suddenly while on his honeymoon in India at 30 years old. His wife, Jennifer Robertson, says it was complications from Crohn's disease. Then the real brouhaha begins a couple of weeks later when it's revealed the company can't access more than a quarter of a billion dollars of customers' funds. And it's at that point Jennifer becomes a central figure in the mystery. This is How to Grow a DecaCorn, where we give you an inside peek into the real-time adventures of Kraken, a company that's... This is a podcast put out by Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. For the past 72 hours, I have been spending every waking moment trying to solve a mystery.

An employee named Christina Yee is discussing the case with the company's CEO, Jesse Powell. He's a big name in the Bitcoin world. He's the guy who put out a $100,000 reward to whoever could help get their money back. Yeah, but I do want to say something about this timeline in January. You know, they didn't stop, like super suspect here. They didn't shut down the website until the 26th. They didn't stop taking deposits and allowing trades to go through until January 26. He passed away December 9th. Why?

I find this suspicious. She is a fast mover. Following getting married, she's responsible and acts timely in getting the will, in planning the honeymoon, going on the honeymoon, go to the embalmer, fly back to Halifax, deliver the body to the funeral home, have the funeral, probate the will, become executor of the estate. So fast moving. And then everybody drags their feet on informing clients that they should stop using the exchange.

Right. This is shocking. You know, I don't know what they were waiting for, but it was definitely wrong to not tell the clients that you had lost the private keys because people kept putting money in. We're told the company continued to operate the exchange on the advice of its corporate counsel. Still, at this point, lots of customers are furious. It's not just that the company has waited so long to inform them that the CEO is gone. It's the news that Gerald Cotton has left everything to Jennifer in a will he'd signed just two weeks before he's said to have

died in India. Jennifer says the will had been made on the advice of their lawyer. But from where customers sit, they're seeing her fortune being made just as theirs is slipping away. The people at Kraken spent a lot of time connecting the dots. Sometime after they announced his death, January 14th, Jennifer Robertson moves assets that she just inherited from Gerald into a trust to protect it from creditors. You know, obviously she's just, she's looking out for her own interests here. And obviously, you know, the creditors are going to play this like a Madoff type situation. You know, like the money was stolen.

You know, like the money was stolen. And if, you know, the boats and the planes that your husband bought you, those belong to the creditors. That was the creditor's money. Jennifer told us she had just been executing the will. She believed those were her assets purchased with their own money. She also hires a private investigator to get access to Jerry's passcodes to unlock the cold wallets. But he comes up empty-handed. The court appoints a monitor tasked with finding more than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of missing assets.

But it doesn't take them long to realize the hunt isn't going so well. By spring, the company, Ernst & Young, goes back before a judge. The court-ordered monitor working on the failed cryptocurrency company Quadriga CX says the insolvent business should be placed in bankruptcy. Ernst & Young says there's only a remote chance the company will emerge from creditor protection. Jennifer voluntarily agrees to stop moving or selling assets. And Ernst & Young carries on, picking through the wreckage of Quadriga and releasing regular reports on its findings. So the bombshell report was actually the fifth report of the Monitor, which came out in June 2019. And we sort of knew that there was a lot

of funny business going on at Quadriga. We didn't know what was happening internally. So the fifth monitor report began to spell up that, you know, paint that picture. For starters, the monitor was unable to find any proper bookkeeping. There was no separation between the client funds and Gerald's funds or the exchange funds. What money was made for the business and what were the funds that belonged to customers. It was all just sort of one giant pool of money that Gerald Cotton played with. He treated Quadriga like his own personal bank account. He was taking crypto assets and cash out of that system.

He was often directing the third party payment processors to send money to his own accounts, right? He bought a Cessna airplane. He bought a yacht in 2017. They bought several different properties with all this money. So money was being taken off the exchange. Investigators would also come across some curiously named accounts, 14 in particular. Gerald Cotton, from the early days, he began to set up these fake accounts that he would give them crazy names like R2-D2, C3PO, Scepter Jerry. And one of these was called the Chris Marquet account, and he would fund them with fake assets. You know, initially, he would begin funding them with fake dollars, and then later he'd begin funding them with fake crypto assets, like fake Bitcoin.

If Scepter Jerry sounds familiar, it's because that's the name Jerry used as a teenager on that online forum Talk Gold. Remember how Jerry had bragged about how fast their business was expanding? Well, what investigators discovered was that in that first year, the majority of all the Bitcoin trades on that platform were made by Gerald Cotton himself. But the Chris Marquet account was the account that he used the most so that he could trade against his own customers. And it is through the Chris Marquet account that most of the funds, most of the customer funds on Quadriga disappeared.

To make sense of what happened, it helps to understand how the exchange operated in the first place. exchange operated in the first place. The way that it kind of worked was they had this weird in-between currency, I could call it, which was called Quadbucks or Quadrigabucks. This is Alexandra Posadsky again, the reporter from the Global Mail newspaper. She says that when customers signed up to the exchange, they'd send their Canadian or American funds to one of the third-party processors working with Quadriga. Then once the money was in the bank, their trading accounts would be credited. But what customers may not have realized was

they were being credited not with real dollars, but with quad bucks. With quad bucks or Quadriga bucks. And those were effectively these units that could then be used to buy cryptocurrencies. And those were effectively these units that could then be used to buy cryptocurrencies. So this actually allowed Jerry to get around some regulations because he could say he wasn't performing a currency exchange operation. He was a vendor and the good that he was selling was quad bucks rather than acting directly as an exchange. rather than acting directly as an exchange.

So when it came to Chris Marquet and the other alias accounts, they were being credited with quad bucks too. Trouble was, investigators couldn't find any real money backing them up. So essentially, it appears Jerry had been using phony funds to buy real Bitcoin from customers. He would use those fake dollars to buy Bitcoin. And it was sort of a way of betting if the price of Bitcoin would go up, because if the price of Bitcoin go up, he could then take that real Bitcoin and resell it. And then he would make more money and he'd profit from that. Right. And the other way he did it later on in the Chris Markey account is that he would fund it with fake, say, Bitcoin, right?

And he would then use that fake Bitcoin and sell that to customers on his exchange and get cash, right? And that would be then if the price of Bitcoin dropped, he would come out ahead. But more often, he didn't come out ahead. Most of Bitcoin dropped, he would come out ahead. But more often, he didn't come out ahead. Most of the time he lost money. So he lost a huge amount of assets this way. It became like just a line of credit for him, the exchange that he could use to keep funding this gambling habit. The Ontario Securities Commission, one of Canada's financial regulators,

would investigate. The OSC, they put out a giant report, and what they say is that he traded, he lost like $115 million Canadian dollars trading. The majority of the lost funds were because he gambled them away. And these were real funds, lost on other exchanges. On his own exchange, they found Jerry making massive deposits into his Chris Marquet account. A whopping $100 million fake dollars one time, $50 million another.

The OSC would conclude that Quadriga had been an old-fashioned fraud wrapped up in modern technology. Quadriga was a house of cards and then it was a Ponzi scheme. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. So when the value of Bitcoin was high in 2017, cash flow wouldn't have been a worry for Jerry. People had been clamoring to get in on the crypto craze. $800 million had gone through just three of the many shadow banks he'd used. There's this one striking photo a Kudryga contractor shared with investigators. It's a shot from inside one of Jerry and Jennifer's homes. It's their kitchen island, a big granite topped one. And with the remains of the day scattered across it, a handbag, travel magazine,

a box of Kleenex, it might be typical of many families. Were it not for the fact that there were also stacks of cash, 20s, 50s, $100 bills, returns from a Bitcoin ATM. So money was definitely flowing into the company, which turned out to be Jerry's home. Now, whether he ever worried about the volatility of cryptocurrency, it's hard to say. But by 2018, the bubble bursts. So the whole thing, that little house of cards comes crumbling down, right?

Quadrigo was run like a Ponzi scheme, where if people wanted to withdraw funds, he was dependent on new money coming back into the exchange. Unfortunately, and we see this with other frauds, for example, with Bernie Madoff, when the markets kind of turn sour, people withdraw money and you run into trouble. And that's what happened with Quadriga. The gap between the real money on the exchange and the fake money was getting bigger and bigger and bigger over time. So when the price of Bitcoin started to fall in January 2018, and the other cryptocurrency assets started to fall, people were anxious to withdraw their cash from the exchange. They wanted to sell their Bitcoin, realize any profits that they'd made over the years and get that money off there before they lost any more money. But he didn't have the cash to give them. It kind of looked like he was sort of trying to trade himself out of a hole.

And because we know how volatile the price of Bitcoin is and how fast things can change and how fast someone can get rich on, you know, good timing. Maybe he believed that he was just kind of one trade away from saving the company and saving all of this money that had gone missing. So he just kept trading, but then he just kept on losing money. So things go sideways for Jerry. just kept on losing money. So things go sideways for Jerry. There are complaints to the Better Business Bureau, many of which are from people who sent money,

but don't see their accounts being credited. And the company isn't returning calls or emails. To make things worse, the address listed on the company's Facebook page no longer leads to the office space in Vancouver's historic gas town, but instead to a rather lonely-looking post office box at a small UPS store on the city's east side. Someone on Reddit asked the obvious question. Sirius, why is your office a fake address?

Someone from Quadrigo replies. It's a PO box, just like our competitors. We could have a physical office where you could visit, but then we would risk being robbed. One couple even goes to the media and the police. They say their $100,000 has gone missing. Now that grievance got Jerry's attention. Jerry explained the mix-up, paid the money back, and the complaint was dropped. If Jerry was stressed about any of it, you wouldn't have known it from those leaked texts with his operations manager, Aaron Matthews. In December 2018, when Jerry's on his honeymoon, just days before he's pronounced dead, he tells Aaron the

court case involving CIBC, the bank which had frozen more than $26 million of Kudriga's funds, is about to be resolved. Jerry writes, It's been bad, but most businesses would have failed by now, so despite whiny clients, I think it has been handled all right. So despite whiny clients, I think it has been handled all right. But of course, despite the talk of being back on track, in truth, the company is totally off the rails. Jerry is moving millions of dollars out of his personal bank accounts to pay back customers.

Mind you, it was theirs to begin with. QCX Int, the online sleuth, was still trading. They were also clever because they kind of drip fed the release of funds. And so some funds were still getting out. And occasionally you would get like a good amount of funds back. And that then gave you confidence to go, OK, things are moving again. All right, I'll increase, you know, the amount of funds back. And that then gave you confidence to go, OK, things are moving again. All right, I'll increase, you know, the amount of funds that I'm pushing through the platform. The reality was very different. Those cold wallets people had pinned their hopes on, the ones said to hold over $250 million. Those cold wallets had been inactive since about April 2018. There was nothing in them to

begin with. That money was long gone. By the time Gerald Cotton supposedly died, the money was all gone from the exchange. He'd moved it off the exchange. I couldn't believe what was actually going on in Quadriga and just how far that fraud went. Michael Perklin had hung out with Jerry. He works as a security officer for a cryptocurrency exchange called Shapeshift. It was one of the platforms Jerry was trading on. He read every one of the investigators' reports. I read it like it was a on. He read every one of the investigators' reports. I read it like it was a novel, page turn after page turn, just being sucked in. And

honestly, it broke my heart. Because he trusted Jerry. He recommended Quadriga to family and friends. Collectively, he figures they've lost about a million dollars. Absolutely, I felt betrayed. It completely destroyed my mental image of the Jerry that I knew years ago. And honestly, it made me start to question my own judgment of character. I had always seen Jerry as this honest, truthful person. And clearly, he wasn't. If I've been wrong about Jerry, how wrong have I been about other people in my life? He's been running over old conversations in his mind.

One day in the co-working space, we were talking about privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and how it is not an anonymous currency. It's a pseudonymous currency and what that meant and how you could send transactions in a way that would make it very difficult to identify the owner. He was definitely well-versed in these topics. As I look back, I guess in hindsight, maybe he was so interested in that type of privacy

because he was planning on stealing money from millions of Canadians. I don't know. I can't say that. But he definitely was interested in a lot of that type of thing. For QCXint, the investigator's reports confirmed what he already knew, that the money was gone. He's the one who's been compiling a dossier on Quadriga. QCXint and the others had already poured over the blockchain. That's the public digital ledger. You know, you would normally be able to see a pattern of funds being swept to hot wallets and then from hot wallets to cold wallets.

Remember, cold wallets store the bulk of the crypto offline for security. Now, the difference with Quadriga was you couldn't really find a cold wallet. You know, there were just a series of hot wallets. And in turn, those hot wallets seem to be replenished with funds from other exchanges, which again is weird. There's been very, very shady, strange activity going on. We wanted to talk to Aaron Matthews, but he declined to take part in this podcast. We now know that he was the guy from the trailer park.

He'd been receiving death threats. So we're told when a journalist showed up at his home, he felt shaken. Aaron only ever interacted with Jerry virtually. He'd never even met him in person. Ultimately, he turned down the position as interim CEO. And we're told now he feels like the fall guy. as interim CEO.

And we're told now he feels like the fall guy. So what drove Jerry to gamble all the money away? Was it just the need to pay back customers? Or was there more to it? Well, as you know, Jerry died. And, well, he pretended to die. And then he gave me a half a million dollars to keep quiet. I'm kidding.

No, I'm actually in Vietnam in a beautiful coastal city. This is a guy named Freddie Hartline. He was friends with both Jerry and Michael Patron. He became one of Quadriga's earliest customers. In 2013 is when I found Bitcoin. It sounds really ridiculous and cheesy, but, you know, it was like a magic key. And then that little magic key grew into something that, you know, now I'm allowed to live pretty much, you know, without worry of financial worry. And not like a serious baller.

I have a humble existence. Freddie says he lost a bit, but not a lot, with the collapse of the company. He posits that Jerry's troubles began with that software bug in 2017. The one where hundreds of millions of assets were permanently frozen worldwide. It was a mistake that cost Quadriga $10 million. So Quadriga was victimized, or Jerry and Quadriga were victimized. So I think part of the context

that everybody has to understand is that that's where the problem, it appears, started. Okay? I mean, imagine you own a company and you're doing very well and you know his revenue potentially was you know when it was happening like happening was you know in the millions and apparently his profit margin was in the hundreds of thousands per week or per month you know but even at that at that level you take a hit and, you know, and he stayed open.

He kept the doors open. And so there's a lot of context here. It's easy to imagine that he would start playing with the money to try to make up for the losses, which we called gambling, which it kind of is like gambling. Trading is a terrible thing to get into. So, yeah, it's easy to imagine now what's happened and how everything devolved from there. It's a theory, but it doesn't explain everything.

Yeah, he was an inveterate gambler and that kind of impulsive behavior. He couldn't control himself by the looks of things. And blew just an absolutely eye-popping amount of money if, you know, that data is indicative of what actually happened. So investigators found Jerry misappropriated millions. And he gambled away loads of cash in what appears to have been a disastrous attempt to pay customers back. But there are other theories as well.

Now, there is a hypothesis that was there a counterparty to some of these trades that was somehow benefiting on the other side. So, you know, when he sold, they bought. But QCX Int thinks it's unlikely. The unpredictable market would have made that tough to pull off. But he says there's still another possibility. Cotton had used fake accounts in other names on other exchanges to exfiltrate funds.

And so, which is a horrifying scenario, both for us as creditors and for law enforcement for tracing, because he had access to KYC documentation on the exchange, which is everyone's full names, addresses, birthdates, passport photos, you name it. You've got to provide that when you become a customer on Quadriga. Cotton had access to all of it. It would have been not trivial but also not impossible for him to use some of that data to create fake accounts on other exchanges and then use those to trade

or to withdraw funds to. And that would make it extremely difficult, you know, for law enforcement to trace. So from Quadriga's earliest days, there was some sketchy stuff going on. Jerry using aliases and make-believe money and being part of nearly every single trade on the platform during the company's first month in operation.

It speaks to Gerald Cotton's character. You know, really what he, what, you know, you have to kind of wonder what the arrogance, you know, to just be playing with your customer funds that way. He was just sort of out of control. What we wanted to know was what, if anything, had the company's co-founder Michael Patron known about what Jerry had been up to. He turned us down for a recorded interview. Before launching, he says Jerry had been a high-volume trader on other exchanges. So rather than letting competitors benefit from his trades, Jerry brought it in-house and donated

his trading profits back to the company. And Michael pointed out that Jerry's trading activity had been disclosed to regulators. We did get those financial statements. There's no mention of fake assets or aliases. But yeah, the fact that Jerry was trading with customers was disclosed to the regulator. When we asked Michael about Jerry and the phony funds, he responded by saying while he was at the company, it was obviously real money. And those aliases? Michael writes, the names were likely Jerry being his usual goofball self.

He was a big fan of Star Wars and likely wanted to get a laugh from the auditor. And he added, the accounts were disclosed as belonging to him. And he reminded us that he lost money too, about $800,000. Jen has been, she's been on the receiving end of death threats from some of these creditors to have people coming at you with these theories about how you're this horrible person and you've done these horrible things. I mean, I think it's been a really, really, really difficult time for her. This is Alexander Posadzki again. And it's important to mention, of course, that Jen did return all of her assets. So everything's been liquidated.

She even moved out of the house that they were living in in Nova Scotia. In the fall of 2019, Jennifer Robertson voluntarily agrees to give back $12 million to creditors. And she puts out a statement saying that, dollars to creditors. And she puts out a statement saying that, as a result of the monitor's investigation, she's returning assets she thought were purchased with Jerry's legitimately earned profits, salary, and dividends. I was not aware of nor participated in Jerry's trading activities nor his appropriation of the affected users' funds. And she says she was upset and disappointed to learn what Jerry had been doing, and that she hadn't known about his improper actions. You know, to have your husband die so close after the wedding, on the honeymoon,

you know, there's a loss, a sense of loss and grieving. And then to all of a sudden during that grieving process, discover that your husband was not who you thought he was the whole time. I mean, she's said repeatedly on the record that she did not know what was going on at Quadriga. We do know that there were a number of transactions that were processed on behalf of Quadriga users through a bank account that has been linked to Jen. But I mean, that doesn't prove any sort of guilt on her part. I mean, it's quite easy to imagine a scenario where Jerry said, hey, you know, the bank shut down my bank account again because of crypto. Can I just wire some money to somebody through your bank account? Ernst & Young had discovered through customers that a company Jennifer set up acted as a third-party processor for Jerry.

But Jennifer told us through her lawyer that her actions as a payment processor were at the direction of Mr. Cotton. her actions as a payment processor were at the direction of Mr. Cotton. One of my producers spoke with Jennifer in a brief phone call a little over a year ago. Jennifer told her it had been a very difficult time losing her husband. She said she'd consider doing a recorded interview with us, but she had questions about it. How it would work, and whether she'd be paid. More recently, she has communicated with us through her lawyer, who told us she would not give us an interview because of other commercial arrangements.

She did tell us she's writing a book. Here's Amy Castor. Yeah, I thought he faked his death. You know, he had done little Ponzi schemes in the past as a kid. Now he's dealing with big money. Now he's in Canada. You know, now he's got to face up to the Canadian regulators, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the FBI and all that so so he had to figure out a way out he played video games and the leaving of a game level and disappearing with like the mother of all bombs financially for

canadians like he can't just disappear and think that he can just pop up in another level of the game or another area of the world and think he's going to escape. You know, it's, he's just, it's impossible. He will, if he's still alive,

he will be caught for sure. I don't think he's alive. Um, he did have stomach issues and I wish that we just exhumed the fricking body and do a DNA test and just get it over with. I don't know what, that's a, that's another thing.

That's, that's my biggest issue out of all of this is just exhume the body you fucking idiots that whoever is that's not allowing that to happen because all of this drama and speculation is just like lovely for you know consumption but it's it's not good for you know for the health of anybody that was affected by the tragedy. You know, just do it. Exhumed the freaking body. Check the DNA if there's DNA 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. We'd like to speak with Jennifer Robertson about the allegations that Gerald Cotton could still be alive. Through her lawyer, she told us, quote, she was with Mr. Cotton at the time of his death,

and he's most certainly deceased. But there are people who still have questions. Did the man who ran one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in Canadian history bungle his scam, dying suddenly in India just as it's collapsing? Or is it possible it was planned from the start? Could this have been an exit scheme? He gambled the money away. I mean, what a fool. And if he was that arrogant to think that he could do that, I mean, then you can see how he could have tried to plot his own death. And whether it worked out and he's drinking cocktails on some island somewhere or it sort of went badly and he really did die.

You know, I don't know. Next time on A Death in Cryptoland. We have obviously asked for Cotton to be exhumed so that we can conclusively confirm for the record that he is in fact dead and he's not running around, you know, on a luxury yacht somewhere. I really hope that, you know, they can get to the bottom of this. 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 Yvette Brand. Legal advice by Sean Moorman and fact-checking by Emily Mathieu. Chris Oak is our senior producer and the executive producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. If you're looking for another podcast to listen to, check out Brainwashed, a multi-part investigation into the CIA's experiments in mind control, from the Cold War and MKUltra to the so-called War on Terror. Learn about a psychiatrist who used his patients as human guinea pigs in a Montreal hospital. And what happens in times of fear when the military and medicine collide. Get Brainwashed on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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