By Nathan Ferguson
Gerald cotton, the creator of the crypto exchange QuadrigaCX dying at the age of only 30, raised suspicions in the minds of the vast majority of people. The things which made the suspicions even stronger were the facts that he died in India and that he had written his will just 12 days before his death.
Soon after his death, different versions of the story began to surface as numerous banks, investors, and Reddit forces began to walk on the trail of locked-in assets.
Addressing the questions like: ‘Has Gerald staged his own death?’ or ‘Is he still alive?’, Aaron Lammer, in a recent podcast, shed some light on the outcomes of the investigation so far. He has spent almost two years on the investigation of this mystery. He said that it is not an ordinary case of an exit scam. He equated it with Mount Rushmore, saying that no scam can beat the level of this one. It is difficult to differentiate whether it was an exit scam or a Ponzi scheme.
Synopsis
QuadrigaCX was considered Canada’s top cryptocurrency exchange, which was managed and operated by Quadriga Fintech Solutions. After the death of Gerald Cotten in December 2018, the exchange halted its operations in January 2019 after the declaration of bankruptcy.
According to Gerald Cotten’s wife, he died in India in a road accident. He owed $250 million to 115,000 customers, which were supposed to be in his cold wallets. Gerald was the only one who knew the passwords to those wallets. A lot of fuss began when it was revealed by Taylor Monahan that those wallets were empty months before his death.
Lammer further added that Cotton had a vast experience of cloaking and used VPNs frequently. He was also able of transferring funds from one bank to another and crypto accounts. These abilities made this task a child’s play for him. The most doubtful thing and a loose end in this story are that Cotten wrote his will only a few days before leaving for India.
According to Lammer’s opinion, Gerald frequently moved money from one country to another, and private jets made this work easier for him. Given all of the aforementioned techniques, anyone could have the audacity to perform a heist of this magnitude and start a new life in any part of the world.