Episode Details

What happens when the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange dies with the only keys to the vault? In this episode, we dive into the spectacular collapse of QuadrigaCX, once Canada’s largest crypto exchange. When 30-year-old founder Gerald Cotten died suddenly in India in 2018 due to complications from Crohn's disease, he reportedly took the passwords for C$250 million in customer funds to the grave,.

We explore the unraveling of the mystery, from the discovery that Cotten’s co-founder, Michael Patryn, was actually a convicted identity thief named Omar Dhanani, to the bombshell revelation by the Ontario Securities Commission that the exchange was a massive Ponzi scheme. Join us as we discuss how investigators found the "cold wallets" empty and determined that Quadriga was simply "old-fashioned fraud wrapped in modern technology",.