Uncover - S12: "A Death in Cryptoland" E6: The End Game

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

The revelation that Gerry’s house of cards had been falling apart — just as he’s reported dead in India — leaves people wondering: is this an exit scheme? Could Gerry still be alive? From buying a death certificate to Haitian zombie powder, people talk about the conspiracy theories. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I do the show, FrontBurner. It's a daily news program, five days a week, a deep look at one story you actually want to know more about. One of the coolest parts of this job is when people show me how often one of our episodes comes up in their group chats. It's a real range of topics, too. Rent gouging, Trump and Elon Musk, the Middle East. Even culture stuff that has real consequences, like Diddy, for example. So if you are one of those people sharing our stuff in your group chat, I just want to say thank you. And if you aren't yet, please find and follow FrontBurner wherever you get your podcasts,

and please get it in the chat. This is a CBC Podcast. We have no facts that prove that the death was faked. We have no facts that prove that the death actually happened. We have some written down notes from doctors. We have coroner certificates, death certificates. We have pieces of paper that allege that something did happen. And we have apparently a grave site with a body in it, which may or may not be his. This is Michael Perklin, not to be confused with Podriga's co-founder Michael Patron. Perklin's the guy who played board games with Jerry. And now he's waiting for the final moves.

Like all the other Canadians watching this story, any new, real information is going to be fascinating to watch. On a mid-December day in 2019, lawyers representing Quadriga's creditors are seeking exactly that, new information. They've just sent a remarkable letter to National Police Headquarters in Ottawa. It's been dispatched by courier, email and fax. And they put it up on their website. This is CBC News.

Given the subject matter, the contents are immediately made public. Lawyers representing clients who lost millions in the bankruptcy of what was Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange have formally asked RCMP to exhume the remains of the firm's founder. The lawyers want an exhumation and autopsy on the body of Gerald Cotton to quote confirm both its identity and the cause of death given the questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotton's death. It seems fitting that the letter is dated Friday the 13th. For those who have been demanding proof of Gerald Cotton's death, this is big.

Suddenly their belief that the body should be dug up no longer has the air of kooky conspiracy about it. Their suspicions are being given legitimacy. Their lawyers have asked for Cotton's body to be exhumed to prove he didn't fake his own death and run off with the money. People want to know, rightly so, is that his body? You know, they want a little bit more evidence, a little bit more proof that that's really his body. And from the face of it, it seems like a simple thing to do. Just exhume the body and do a DNA test. Find out if that was him.

Cotton's widow, Jennifer Robertson, says in an emailed statement she is, quote, heartbroken to learn of the exhumation request. She says it's not clear to her how it would further assist the asset recovery process. To creditors, it's not clear to her how it would further assist the asset recovery process. To creditors, it's obvious. The answers to many of their questions are buried in a Halifax grave. And they're getting frustrated. The RCMP won't say whether they intend to dig up the remains. They say they can't comment. That they're still investigating.

So that just seems like such an obvious starting point. And if it's not him, then where is he? But could Jerry have faked his own death? Well, it makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, he was operating a massive Ponzi scheme. It was going down in a big way. So he had to either, you know, face maybe going to jail for fraud or or find another way out of there. You know, maybe like something like fake his death and then go drink cocktails and some beach in Thailand or something.

I don't know. I'm not convinced he's dead. he's dead? So while I'm not an expert in faking death, in my very brief searches using web search engines I found that apparently India is one of the easiest countries in which to fake your own death. The exact mechanics of how one would go ahead and fake their own death, I don't know. But you can find a lot of information on the internet. But how easy would it be to stage a death in India? For 500 bucks and a couple of weeks of research, it's very achievable for anyone. Technically, I have now been dead for nearly seven years. I'm seven years dead.

I'm Takara Small, and this is A Death in Cryptoland. Chapter 6 The Endgame Okay, just so we're clear, under normal circumstances, considering the idea that Gerald Cotton could have staged his death seems, quite frankly, bonkers. But given the facts of this story, some people believe that it's not only possible, but the most logical explanation. So let's do a quick recap of what we know. You've got this young 25-year-old Gerald Cotton, who has a history of running Ponzi's since he was like a kid 16 years old,

who met this ex-felon, Michael Patron, formerly Omar Dhanani. 2013, they launch Quadriga. This is Amy Castor, the freelance journalist in Los Angeles. You know, they were doing funny business from day one. In the company's first year, Jerry is involved in nearly all of the Bitcoin trades on the platform. And he's setting up alias accounts with silly names. Scepter Jerry, C3PO, and he's funding them with fake assets. And in 2016, Michael Patron decides that he's going to split and leaves and says he's not going to have anything more to do with the exchange.

And Jerry kind of goes forward like a one man band. And he's even at one point told his new contractors that Patron never even existed, that Michael Patron was just a rumor made up by competitors. Meanwhile, Jerry is siphoning customer money off the exchange to pay for luxury items like a plane, a yacht, properties. Then in 2018. Five years after Quadriga began, it's now turned into a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme. And it's about to go bust. And Gerald marries his partner, Jennifer. In November, he writes up a very, very detailed will, and then they head off to India. And then in December,

Gerald Cotton is dead. And then boom boom. Soon we realized through court documents that, I mean, these are just a big, big Ponzi scheme. You know, Jerry had everybody fooled. So what is the most probable scenario? That Jerry did indeed die of complications from Crohn's disease in India? Just as his Ponzi scheme was falling apart? Or is it possible he didn't want to go to prison for fraud,

so he planned an elaborate exit scheme? On a balance of probabilities, I think it is more likely that Jerry is still alive today than he died on a humanitarian mission to India. In retrospect, Michael Perklin thinks Jerry may have been planning an exit for some time. Just seeing how he was learning to fly on his own, his knowledge of private payments, his knowledge of privacy on the internet, and his access to those significant amount of deposits that ultimately were lost during trading on other exchanges, all of that

could be explained away by Jerry actively doing these things on purpose, losing the trades to another account, which walked away with all those winnings, passing them back to him the next day. Jerry would have had the means and the motive to disappear, he says. If you were planning on stealing a lot of money from millions of Canadians, and you were planning on disappearing, the skill of flight is a very useful one because you're no longer dependent on commercial aircrafts. You can rent any aircraft that you want and fly yourself with very little scrutiny. Cash is a wonderful vehicle for getting around banks.

We do know Jerry dealt in a lot of cash. Since banks didn't want to deal with Quadriga, the company had found various ways to move money in and out of the business. Quadriga had a very large customer in Canada that had a bunch of Bitcoin ATM machines all over Canada. And what they are is they're a way for people, anybody, to walk in and just put their cash in the machine and you can buy Bitcoin. and just put their cash in the machine and you can buy Bitcoin. According to the Ontario Securities Commission, the president of this Bitcoin ATM company would hand-deliver cash to Jerry. You know, sometimes this business owner would come over via a private jet to deliver suitcases of cash to Gerald.

Ultimately, Quadriga would get more than $20 million in cash from the company. And the OSC pointed out, given its origins, no Canadian bank would have touched this money. And Jerry would have known that. Quadriga had for a while its own Bitcoin ATM machines. So they had a lot of cash. And when they ran into liquidity problems late in the game as people were withdrawing cash assets from the exchange. They had to kind of keep the game going. And one of the ways was just to give people cash. So if I was withdrawing money, instead of getting a bank wire, they would have a service where they'd actually send somebody a box of cash delivered to your door. This meeting is being recorded.

Okay, it's going. This is Jesse Powell over Zoom. I am co-founder and CEO of Kraken, which is a digital asset exchange trading in 40-something assets. Started the company back in 2011. Kraken is the American cryptocurrency exchange that put up that $100,000 reward for the best tip to crack this mystery. Jesse has turned up with a virtual backdrop that makes it look like he's commandeering the Starship Enterprise.

In reality, he's in L.A. His blonde hair is pulled back into a tiny ponytail. And I got involved with this quadriga stuff just as trying to be helpful part of the process to solve the case and keep the recovery of funds or recovery identification of a criminal potentially behind this. Jesse knows a lot of people who are affected, customers, even staff. The bounty inspired all kinds of folks to write in. And we've collected tons and tons of hundreds of reports from people in the community

with tips, information, you know, sometimes some more wild than others. You know, of course, a lot of people claiming that, you know, stuff like they saw him in India last week or something like that, or they, you know, they know of alternate identities that he had, or they know that he keeps a safe in a particular location, you know, in the forest or something. Like things along those lines, some are definitely very far-fetched, but others are kind of based in reality. They seem believable.

For now, the reward has gone unclaimed. Jesse understands where the conspiracy theories are coming from. The suspicious thing about Quadriga really was that it seemed like Cotton's death, it was very timely, like he was maybe a few weeks away, if not less, from having to come clean or shut down the exchange and make some story up. I mean, it could be that the stress related to that was a contributing factor in his death. But the timing of the death is kind of convenient. You know, it just all adds up to be this like crazy mystery. I don't think that there was like a conspiracy and I don't think that he's faked his death. And I think he just lost the money and then he died and,

and that's it. But who knows? If I were in India, I'd be keeping my eyes open. You've seen the movie Die Hard, right? You steal $4,000, no one's going to come looking for you. You steal a few hundred million, they will look for you unless they think you're dead. That's what Alan Rickman says. So, you know, best Christmas movie ever. Remember Brett Johnson? He's the felon who worked with Omar Donani, aka Michael Patron, on Shadow Crew, the criminal online forum that traded in fake and stolen bank cards and ID. Given his own experience running from the law,

Brett's got a lot of opinions about escape plans. So we offered up his thoughts on Gerald Cotton. He dies in an area in India where it's known to fake deaths. That's a known area for that. So this is where the guy supposedly passes away. So is it believable that he could have gotten a passport, or Cotton could have gotten a passport, could have stolen an identity, could be living under assumed name?

Certainly believable. We dealt and we taught all of that. I can do it. He can do it. All right? So my name's Connor Woodman, and between, I guess, 2011, 2014, I hosted a show called Scam City, which was on the National Geographic channel and also went out on Netflix in the US.

The world's greatest cities attract visitors by the millions. Soft targets for the waiting scammers. I'm Connor Woodman. Every episode, Connor would go to a different destination to uncover the local schemes which tourists run up against. The guidebooks will tell you exactly what to see, but there's one thing they don't tell you. It's a chapter the thieves don't want written. I've met a lot of criminals in my time, yeah. We're talking with Connor via webcam. He's in London. He's got stylishly messy hair and what's possibly a pandemic goatee. And, fun fact, if you're a fan of Fleabag,

Connor used to be married to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Connor first heard about Gerald Cotton in 2019, when one of his old episodes captured a new audience, Redditors. It's the one where he goes to India, and he's looking at medical insurance fraud. He's suffering from acute bronchitis with breathlessness. He picks up a phony diagnosis and receipts for procedures that aren't done.

So then I thought, what else can you get? You know, how far does this go? Connor's fixers have given him a number for a man with connections to the underworld. Hello? Hello, is that Mr. Singh? Yes, who are you? I don't recognize this number. Well, I believe you might be able to help me acquire a forged document. In a key scene, you can see Connor sitting in the back of a cab as it pulls up to a prearranged meeting spot

on a darkened street in Delhi, India. The car's headlights light up a figure in a hoodie who approaches the idling car. Hey, I'm Bobby. You're a friend of Mr. Singh's? Yeah. Yeah. The taxi is kitted out with a hidden camera, and you can see Bobby in profile. His hood is obscuring his face.

Connor casts an eerie shadow. He poses his question to Bobby. He tells me you might be able to help me with a bit of paperwork that I'm after. What kind of paperwork are you looking for? Well, I believe it may be possible to, say, fake my own death. You mean to say a death certificate?

Exactly. Can we arrange? So it'll be a genuine death certificate? It's going to be a genuine death certificate. Right. Connor glances out the window and then back at the man. And how much is that going to cost me? $25,000.

Repease? Yeah, you need a repeat. Okay. Less me? $25,000. Repease? Yeah, I need a repeat. Okay. Less than about $500 Canadian. Connor told him exactly what he wanted. I told him what date I wanted to die, or to be recorded as dead, and he said, okay, leave it with me.

The night that I actually picked up the death certificate, it was right at the end of the shoot. We'd chosen a spot which was kind of down a quiet little street where a little alley that I was waiting under and, um, you know, dogs lying in the dirt, you know, asleep horns beeping in the distance. I think it was about 10, 11 o'clock at night. And it was, it was still over 30 degrees, you know, um, and I just stood there waiting and waiting and waiting. And then eventually this guy turned up. He had his hood up and he just had this little envelope for me. And I handed him over 500 bucks.

It's all done? Yeah, it's all done. Oh my god. It's my... It looks official. It's all countersigned by the birth and death registrar. Yeah. So that's it. I'm dead.

Officially, you are. He killed me. It's absolutely staggering. I'm slightly taken aback that I've died. I've died on the 27th of January, and yet here I am. Oh, I'm getting scared, mate. I'm talking to a dead man. Heart attack. That's the stated cause of death.

So I was happy. He was happy. We shook hands and he wandered off the way that he'd come. Never saw or talked to him again. And the only name I knew him by was Bobby, which I'm 100% sure was not his real name. So yeah, wherever you are, Bobby. I wonder how many other people Bobby's killed. So what does this prove? Nothing really, other than it can be done.

It also inspired a whole cottage industry of alternate theories. 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. guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You know, like I said, my personal opinion, I choose to believe that this was a giant extravagant robbery because I think it's more fun to believe that. It's pretty lame to believe that this guy I thought was really nice was just so stupid he lost a quarter billion dollars. It's kind of cooler to believe that he tricked me and everyone else and then pulled off one of the greatest heists in Canadian history. Alex Sakhild, you may recall, is one of the Bitcoin nerds in Vancouver. So, I mean, which guy would you rather know?

Like this super badass, you know, like smart genius who tricked the world and got away with it all? Or like the guy who like tripped down the stairs and lost all the money. Alex has even come up with his own hypothesis of what may have happened. It's definitely original. Oh, my theory, I believe, is unique in this regard. So eventually I just popped into my head some stuff I'd heard before and looked into. So I know it's real. It's this stuff called Haitian zombie powder. Haitian zombie powder. It's actually a thing. The phenomenon was

made famous by a Canadian anthropologist who traveled to Haiti nearly 40 years ago, Wade Davis. Voodoo practitioners were known to create the drug. One of the ingredients identified was a poison found in puffer fish. And the way it's used by the witch doctors of Haiti is they will give it to a person, it makes them appear dead for up to three days to a week, I believe. And then you feed, give them the antidote to bring them back. But during, before you give them the antidote, you wait for them to have a funeral and be buried. And then when you give them the antidote, they come back. So that's the brief history of Haitian zombie powder.

Okay, just to be clear, we haven't cracked the case. We don't think Jerry is a zombie. That's a bit of folklore. But the science has shown that toxins can slow down the metabolism to the point where someone appears dead. It's a little out there. I guess I'll say it this way. So if you were to be trying to pull off one of the most extravagant heists in history, where he's setting up all these aspects from his honeymoon, to going out building an orphanage in one of the poorest places in the world, to looking like an accident all at the same time, you know, like, and you're going for that extravagant rush, like faking your own death's not an easy thing um so to actually go in a near-death state uh yeah my theory is he used

haitian zombie powder to fake his death swapped out swapped out the body and since they had a closed casket and they refused to hashtag dig him up um which i've never been able to get trending but i've tried really hard. No one finds it as funny as me. And that's why I think like the only way to disprove that theory is by an actual like exhuming. It's almost never happens. I feel like this is, you know, crazy circumstances enough, you know, that we should maybe dig him up. I know the conspiracy theories are out there, but to me, the balance of probabilities lies with him actually having been deceased in Jaipur.

So I'm probably about 95% certain that he is in fact dead. But, you know, I am happy to be proven otherwise if new evidence comes to light. QCX Int, the online sleuth, figures logistics alone would make it unlikely Jerry is still alive. There would have to be so many people that would need to be kind of bribed or complicit in the scheme for a fake death to be pulled off. Another sticking point for him is, if this were an exit scheme, it doesn't seem like a smart one. Let's just consider that hypothesis for a second, that Cotton is alive somewhere,

and he planned this from the beginning. It just, although he was sloppy in a lot of ways, it makes me think that he would have planned it better, that he wouldn't have had all the assets in Canada. He's gone to India. He's left his wife there, but all of the properties are in her name. You know, like you would have planned it a bit differently. You would have had offshore assets. You would have had money in Bitcoin, let's face it. You would have had a lot of assets in crypto that you could be moved around anonymously without needing banks, you know, without needing intermediaries.

I might be stretching there because I'm putting myself in the shoes of if I was exit scamming, what would I do? You know, there would be no trace. Instead, QCXint says Jerry left him a trail. says Jerry left him a trail. And then just being sloppy and, you know, all these domain names and email addresses. I mean, the thing is, he maintained so many. There are so many domains.

There's literally hundreds of domains and email addresses and things. But, you know, I think he just lost track and some of those things overlap. And so if you were going to exit scam properly, you would have mopped that up. QCXint was even able to connect Jerry to another alias, Murdoch1337, one he'd used on Black Hat World. Black Hat World is called Black Hat World for a reason. There's a whole lot of pretty shady, dodgy stuff going on there, you know,

and people buying clicks and fake reviews and scam eBay accounts and all kinds of stuff. You know, so for Cotton to have an account on there, again, it starts to really build out the picture of, well, what is this dude who's the CEO of a supposedly legitimate exchange doing posting on Black Hat World? You would have gone into Black Hat World and deleted all your posts in your account. Things like that, that make me think like, this is the hallmarks of someone who has died and they've left all this stuff behind. They haven't had time to mop it up. left all this stuff behind. They haven't had time to mop it up. But the thing with Quadriga, it wasn't a kid's game anymore. I mean, this was serious business.

To Amy Castor, this isn't about whether an exit plan was logical. She says Gerald Cotton just needed one. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now missing. He has taken money off the exchange. He's bought houses and property and planes and boats. I mean, so now the gig is up. But now it's not, you know, he's not like running these Ponzi's on the top gold form where he's just some anonymous person on the forum. I mean, people know who Gerald Cotton is. This is like some serious shit that is coming down. So so there has to be an exit plan of some sort.

Right. Now, some might think this faked his own death scenario is a little out there. But Amy says you have to understand the industry to get why it's not so far-fetched. I mean, you know, I've been writing about cryptocurrency for a while. So in a way, you see a lot of grifters in the space. You see a lot of hacks on exchanges. You see a lot of money disappear for funny reasons. So this, in a lot of ways, this wasn't that much different. You know, I mean, we'd seen this happening over and over again in the Bitcoin space. It's this world of basically really dumb criminals.

There's a lot of crooks, a lot of stupidity. There's a lot of greed. There's a lot of foolishness. David Gerrard is what crypto enthusiasts call a no-coiner. He'd been following the industry for years when a friend suggested he write a book. I went, that's a good idea. Make it Why Bitcoin is Stupid. And that is how Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain was born. It's named after the movie Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

As soon as David heard the announcement that Quadriga's CEO was dead, he thought, did he fake it? I was thinking how long before that money starts moving. Because it's like the destiny of all cryptocurrency exchanges is to be hacked or have all the money just stolen exit scams are quite normal which is sad but true which is why having an exchange called trustworthy just means maybe you can get your money out standards are very low in cryptocurrency as I said it's a place where you can go to re get ripped off

quite easily. On the promise that you'll get rich for free maybe, which tends not to work out for some reason. We've already mentioned Mt. Gox. It's still the most famous cryptocurrency scandal. $400 million worth of Bitcoin hacked. But David Gerrard says there are so many stories. One he likes to tell is about a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme run by a Texan who went by PirateAt40. People lost about $4.5 million, and they complained to the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. So first they had to convince the SEC that these things were money. And then they had to convince the SEC they'd given all their money to this guy called Pirate. And that Pirate was sent off to prison for about eight years.

David believes Bitcoin became a playground for scammers preying on crypto enthusiasts looking for alternatives to big government and big banks. It was like a bat signal for scammers, you know. Here's some naive people who think this is the future of money. This time it's all different, you know. And a lot of these people turned out to be serial scammers, like people who've been convicted of mail fraud showed up in Bitcoin trying to run their next scam, that sort of thing. And David says the lack of regulations has made it easy for the bad guys to rip people off. He's amazed how Jerry was able to set up and use so many shadow banks. It was absolutely the dodgiest financial dealing. I can't, I'm sort of amazed that nobody noticed

and did anything about this earlier. I mean, I think the regulators were arguably asleep when they shouldn't have been. Someone should have noticed that someone was trying to push all of this questionable money around. And no one did. Now they're noticing. And better late than never. Cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada are now required to register with the country's

anti-money laundering watchdog, Fintrack. In the US, companies have had to register with their equivalent, FinCEN, for about eight years. Even so, Amy Castor believes regulators across North America are still snoozing. There hasn't been the regulatory oversight that the system as a whole, what's needed to stop the level of funny business that's going on. We asked Fintrek for an interview to learn what they knew about how Quadriga had operated.

The company had been registered with them in the early years, but they said legally they couldn't disclose whether they took any action against the company to ensure it followed the rules. The British Columbia Securities Commission ordered Quadriga to stop trading in 2016, when Jerry failed to file financial statements. Clearly, it wasn't enough to prevent the fraud from snowballing. I kind of blame the Canadian banking system a little, not going to lie. I kind of blame the Canadian banking system a little. Not going to lie. Andrew Wagner is from the Bitcoin co-op in Vancouver.

He believes crypto companies are pushed into the fringes by the big banks. What non-shady method are they expected to use when banks won't give them bank accounts? And the risk tolerance claims they're making are bullshit. It's a monopolistic endeavor. They see competition and they mean to thwart the competition. That's full stop. You know, I've seen a lot of exchanges rise and fall in the Bitcoin crypto industry. The majority of Ponzi schemes didn't set out to be Ponzi schemes.

A lot of them set out to be funds that they thought would be, oh yeah, I'm a genius trader. My fund is going to succeed and be the best. That's how most Ponzi schemes start. And then they're like, oh no, I'll just cheat a little here and there, get it back on my feet. It's kind of like a guy in a casino who's down $100 and thinks he can gamble his way out of the rut. If he tries harder, he can get back to zero. Probably not, buddy. Andrew figures this is what happened with Jerry. I think 60-40 he died in India.

I've been to India. It's pretty easy to fake a certificate in India. Once I bought a certificate in India, I overstayed my visa. I was staying with a woman I wasn't married to. It was a fake marriage certificate, whatever. The point is, you can do a lot of weird things in India, okay? That was my point. From where I was on the ground reporting this story,

I could see no evidence for a faked death. I could see all sorts of elements about this story that were strange, but I couldn't find any evidence that this death was faked or staged in any way. And in fact, I found a fair amount of evidence that the death was real. So this is Nathan Vanderklip again, the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail newspaper. He went to India after Gerald Cotton was declared dead. Looking at some of the records of, at the embal embalming outfit that had embalmed the body, including speaking with the doctor who had been with him, including speaking with the hotel where

they had been staying, all of those things, including speaking with the police who handled some of the paperwork, including going to the place where the death certificate was held and watching them pull up the death certificate in their system and then print it out, which would suggest that, you know, it was not a Photoshop, but it did in fact exist in the official system. All of those points of evidence would suggest that the death was real. But like he says, there were odd things that happened, including that doctor who refused to embalm the body

because hotel employees had the corpse, not hospital workers. This is Neha Punia, a journalist in Delhi. For weeks, she's been trying to get an interview for us. And finally, she got it. She's speaking in Hindi with the doctor who actually did the embalming, Dr. Vijay Lakshmi. Neha asks Dr. Lakshmi if it was routine for a hotel staff member to bring in a body, or whether she'd found this strange. The doctor avoids the question.

She says the paperwork had been in order. She kept saying, I don't remember the exact details. You know, we see so many bodies every single year. And she kept saying that we had a copy of his passport, of the death certificate, of the police clearance. And because there were so many police and official documents associated with this case, I didn't think there was anything odd. Nihal asked the doctor if she'd ever been contacted by Canadian authorities. No, no, no. Okay. The one person we'd love to talk to about what exactly happened in Jaipur is Jennifer Robertson, Jerry's wife.

But as we've said, she's declined to do an interview. Through her lawyer, though, she told us he is most certainly dead. In a statement, she said that after Jerry's death, the general manager of the hotel helped her complete the documents required to have Jerry's body transported back to Canada. He also connected her with a medical transportation company. And that after the embalming, Jerry was placed in a casket,

which she accompanied to New Delhi, where Canadian High Commission staff met her. They flew home December 11th. The funeral was December 14th. We've also tried to speak with Gerald Cotton's parents and his brother, but our messages have gone unanswered. They've never spoken publicly about Jerry

or the allegations that this could have been an exit scheme. By text, Kudriga's co-founder Michael Patron let us know he thinks this theory that Jerry could still be alive is ridiculous. And we asked Michael whether he'd spoken with police. He wrote, No, no law enforcement agency has contacted me. And he made it clear the cops aren't looking for him either. He said he's not on the run or anything.

No police anywhere are looking for me. Yeah, they've expressed no interest in any of the information that has been put to them. After sharing all of his findings with law enforcement, QCX Int hasn't been impressed with the RCMP. Even when, you know, there was hard evidence of fraud provided to them, you know, they would continually come back and say to us, we need more evidence, even in order to investigate. And I mean, to the point where I think I, you know, somewhat frustratingly said, I felt like I actually had to present them with a bloody corpse and a gun with fingerprints on it in order just to get them to investigate.

It's theft. You know, it's like a $200 million bank job could happen. And you've got a law enforcement agency that does next to nothing about investigating it. QCXN says if the FBI hadn't gotten involved, he'd be even more angry. Once the FBI got involved, I think we were actually somewhat reassured

that the FBI could do a far, far better job than the RCMP and had much better tools and had an understanding of cryptocurrency and what's more, a history of successful convictions, you know, in this space. It's been more than two years since the news came out that the CEO of Quadriga died while on honeymoon. We were curious about where this story would be today if it weren't for the online sleuth QCXint, the man who dug up the digital past, uncovering Jerry's history of online scams and shady connections. If, you know, I guess we run with that scenario and go, okay, well, what was the dominant, you know, mainstream narrative at the time? You know, and it was young CEO dies, you know, holding the keys to cryptocurrency millions. I mean, those were the headlines. That was the dominant narrative at the time.

And I suspect it would have persisted. Of the roughly 76,000 customers who had money tied up on Quadriga, just 17,000 have made claims. So far, the monitor has recovered only about $46 million of the more than a quarter of a billion dollars. Some of that comes from assets Jennifer liquidated voluntarily, some from third-party processors. Whether more money will ever be found, QCXint is unsure. But he's still digging.

Quadriga CX may have relied on modern technology to disguise an old-fashioned fraud. But curiously, that same technology is now being used to unearth clues. is now being used to unearth clues. Because if what QCXint is telling us is true, the blockchain could still help unlock the mystery behind one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in Canadian history. We have noted that funds are moving on blockchain, but it is an active investigation, and we can't say more than that. And a significant amount of funds, can I say.

We're not talking, you know, a few dollars and cents. Law enforcement also have their investigation, which is ongoing. But, you know, there is agreement that funds are moving, you know, You know, there is agreement that funds are moving, you know, in a pattern of accounts that we have connected to Quadriga. It's probably the easiest way to describe it. And that activity is unusual. The circumstances around this case are strange. But whether they're odd enough for the RCMP to exhume the body, they won't say.

But without that, speculation that Gerald Cotton could still be alive will persist. And people will be watching. For ghosts. I guess there may come one day in the future where Jerry resurfaces. Maybe he has to go into a populated area to do something and someone recognizes him. Maybe he has to go into a populated area to do something and someone recognizes him. Maybe he decides to reconnect with some of his old friends, old family, old colleagues. That is going to be a fascinating day to watch because it'll be clear then what really did happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day we saw know, we saw a press release come out from the U.S. Department of Justice and said he was arrested somewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if other people were implicated in his exit scheme. I don't think it would be something he would plan alone or that he could have. We are not treating this as closed. There are still individuals out there who we believe have benefited from the fraud at Quadriga. Now, we've got some suspicions about who that might be, and that means that they, you know, they won't want me to be doing what I'm doing.

We don't have a smoking gun or anything just yet, you know, but I can only hope that, you know, there's enough of a data trail to lead to individuals that may yet result in arrests and convictions and hopefully, you know, some amount of funds recovery, even if it's not the entire amount. We've had some pretty interesting chapters, but yeah, it's not over. pretty interesting chapters, but yeah, it's not over. and Graham MacDonald. Our digital producer is Emily Connell. Evan Agard is our video producer. Ben Shannon designed our artwork. Additional audio comes from National Geographic.

Special thanks to Dave Downey, Cecil Fernandez, Yvette Bren, Niha Punia, Rignam Wongkong, Joanna Landsberg, Amanda Cox, Lauda Antonelli, and CBC's Reference Library. Legal advice by Sean Moorman and fact-checking by Emily Mathieu. Chris Oak is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Leslie Merklinger.

If you're looking for another podcast to listen to, check out Someone Knows Something. Each season investigates a different unsolved murder. From a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight to two teenagers killed by the KKK. Someone Knows Something takes you into the story, making you feel like you're part of the investigation as it unfolds. Find it on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I have a friend of mine who, some guy said, here's 300 bitcoins. And he gave him a paper wallet. Oh, yeah. Piece of paper.

Piece of paper with a private key on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, this is stupid. And he threw it in the garbage. What? So that's, I mean, at the time it was like $3. Wow. However, had he just kept that piece of paper.

300 grand. Tossed it under his mattress, whatever. Poor life choices right there. 300 grand, yeah. Poor life choices. But because a lot of people have lost the Bitcoin, a lot of Bitcoins. So what happens to those? They've gone to the ethos. Well, I mean, they're just sort of floating around there.

They're not really. They're not retrievable. They're not retrievable at all. It's like losing cash that got buried and then got burnt. Exactly. It's like burning cash in a way. Yeah. I mean, it's next to impossible to ever recover those coins.

So... You'd have to be a super hacker or even... No, like, I mean... There's no way, yeah. Even like the US government with the biggest computers in the world could not retrieve those coins. Wow. If you've lost the private key. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's impossible to retrieve those.

So in that scenario, I mean, at QuadrigaCX, we're obviously holding a bunch of Bitcoins that belong to other people who have put them onto our exchange. So what we do is we actually store them offline in paper wallets in our bank vault, or in our bank's vault,

in a safe deposit box, because that's the best way to keep the coins secure.