There are some forms of computer security that can be cracked in five minutes by anyone with the know-how (which is quite common), given physical access to the device. There are other forms of computer security that can’t be cracked by the NSA given a decade. And all sorts of layers in between. We don’t know exactly what’s on the laptop, and it might even be a dummy prop that just contains random data that can’t be decrypted at all because it has no actual meaning (the actual wallet being on a completely different device that the guy kept with him when he faked his death).
Probably don’t they just have to guess a pass phrase? What’s his mother’s maiden name? His cat’s name? His cat’s mother’s maiden name? “My name is Ozymandias King of Kings; LOMWYMAD” ?
How about that lap dancer he spent tens of $1000’s on in Vegas? Have they tried her phone number?
Quadriga required proof of identity (scan of Driver’s lic, etc.)
What happened to all that identifying stuff is just another thing to worry about.
And yet, there’s $25 million in uncashed money orders, drawn on an account maintained by the Superior Court of Ontario, that the banks won’t touch, because Quadriga and its third party payment processor can’t prove who the money belongs to.
Think of that - banks turning down deposits of millions of dollars. That’s not greedy banks who want to monopolise the business. That’s banks who are concerned about their legal liability if they accept money of unknown provenance.
Doesn’t sound like taking a scan of a driver’s licence was very effective at proving identity. The greater the amount of money, the greater the proof required that it’s on the up and up.
ETA: and note that this problem arose a year ago, when CIBC first froze the account, and Gerry Cotten and his laptop were both around.
If Quadriga and Costodian (the third party payment processor)had kept good records of the depositors ’ identities, should have been pretty easy for them to prove ownership to the banks and unfreeze the accounts.
In a development that I’m sure is very surprising, the wallets have been accessed and found to be empty.
Are you saying he stole the whole bit and caboodle?
hmmm…
A 30 year old with $200 million suddenly disappears and “is reported dead” while in India.
Is there any evidence?
Like, ya know, a body?
Just wonderin’…
Who would have thought that a ‘banking system’ designed for anonymity could be so easily gamed? :smack:
Yeah, boy, it’s almost like attempting to evade scrutiny and regulation can lead to negative outcomes.
The best part is that the money was all stolen months BEFORE the alleged death of the seemingly reasonably healthy 30-year-old owner with all the keys. Surely a hundred Hollywood screenwriters are racing to get the screenplays for this movie finished? I mean, this HAD to become a movie. the only question is who you cast; I like Andrew Garfield as Gerald Cotten and Hailee Steinfeld as his “widow,” Jennifer Robertson.
I am willing to admit that from time to time I have idly thought to myself, gosh, I wonder if I could achieve financial freedom by pulling off some kind of daring heist. I’m sure everyone has gamed this sort of thing out in their head. The thing is, it’s always a terrible idea. Robbing banks or whatever is violent, and that won’t do. High tech thefts are not something I have any skill in. I know no one willing to be a part of a heist crew who I’d trust. Confidence scams, I just assumed, are hard, take a lot of work, and are apparently more safely done if you’re in a country like Nigeria or India where you are out of reach of the cops in the jurisdiction you’re scamming in.
Never did I think it would be possible to tell people “Hey, let me hold on to that money for you in a completely untraceable way. No, I’m not a bank. I have a cool laptop, though” and then just hop a plane and waltz away with the dough.
It is worth repeating that bitcoin (if that is what we are talking about) was explicitly not designed for banking. It’s right there in the first sentence of the abstract of the paper.
Of course there’s a body. Well, cremated ashes. Surely that’s evidence enough. :dubious:
Honestly, no, really.
Despite what the white paper might say it was pretty straightforward where it was going right from the beginning. Pointing that out is like opioid manufacturers saying they never intended their product to kill tens of thousands of people per year. It’s irrelevant.
And to add:
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I absolutely do not believe for one second Cotten had the only keys. His wife did, too, or some other co-conspirator. But of course, there’s no way for anyone to prove that.
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I don’t think Cotten is dead. There’s a death certificate and an account from the hospital where he allegedly died, but $190 million will bribe a lot of people. Also, in an amusing side note, his last name on the death certificate is misspelled. Normally you’d assume that to be an honest error, but everything about this is both suspicious and hilarious.
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Once criminal investigators really get into this, my prediction is the conspiracy will fall apart quickly.
If you have not read Amy Castor’s summary, do so. It’s not as obviously sleazy a scam as you might think. It is, in fact, much sleazier and more obvious than that.
With as conspiracy-happy as the crypto world is, we shouldn’t be dipping it into ourselves. There’s no actual evidence to suggest or reason to believe Cotten faked his death.
He wasn’t “seemingly reasonably healthy”, he was known to have Crohn’s disease and traveled to a part of the world known to cause temporary sickness even in healthy individuals. It’s not at all implausible he died from complications from Crohn’s disease brought on by travel to the area.
Amy Castor also reports the hospital where Cotten died released a public statement confirming his death:
The “Cotten is still alive” conspiracy theory is really nothing more than cryptocurrency rumors trying to keep the hope alive that QuadrigaCX wasn’t really an obvious scam from the get-go, that they’re all singular victims of Gerald Cotten, and that the money is around somewhere and if they can just find it everyone will be OK.
Much like a corporate embezzler whose scheme unravels when they go on vacation, all the available evidence shows QuadrigaCX completely fell apart because Cotten died, since QuadrigaCX’s operations depended on one man trying to shuffle money around under the notice of regulators.
There are 190 million reasons to suspect Cotten faked his death. That’s not PROOF, it’s sure as hell a reason to be suspicious. A person dying, there being no body, and just some statements from a place where phony death certificates are known to come from, happening months after $190 million is stolen from accounts entirely in control of that person? That’s going to be enough to launch a criminal investigation by professionals whose job it is to be suspicious. People will do prison time over this, and you had better believe that if everyone points a finger at the late Mr. Cotten, detectives are going to seriously explore the hypothesis that Mr. Cotten is not as late as his wife would have you believe.
It is of course quite possible Cotten is legitimately dead, but the Quadriga cover story is quite clearly nonsense.
Cotten isn’t the only rich person to die in India who could seemingly benefit from faking their death, and India AFAIK isn’t known as a world capital of rich people shuffling off to a new life. It might be relatively easy to obtain fake death certificates, but it’s also apparently easy to get caught, if that article everyone links to is an indication. The way his death was handled is indistinguishable from many other people who have died in India, and furthermore, Canadian courts seem to agree since there’s no indication they’re questioning his death.
Second, the alleged millions in crypto stored on the laptop don’t exist. Investigators recently decrypted the laptop to find the crypto wallets stored on it had their contents spent many months ago, before Cotten died. Every available piece of evidence suggests QuadrigaCX spent deposits virtually as soon as they came in and could only cash out customers when someone else made a deposit. A Ponzi scheme, roughly. There’s no money to run off with.
Do we even know if “Gerald Cotten” is his real name?
I think this was the #1 probability from the beginning. Dude who has tens of millions of dollars under his exclusive control updates his will, flies to India, and then suddenly “dies” with shady documentation.
Maybe it is just me, but it sounds a little funny.
My personal guess (and that’s all it is, a guess) is that it was the freezing of the $25 million by the bank last year that triggered Cotten’s problems.
What business can suddenly take a $25 million hit, and carry on without problem? If he was just barely above water, keeping everyone’s account reasonably current, and then suddenly has $25 million frozen, odds are he couldn’t keep operating. But instead of admitting that, and applying for court protection, that’s when “robbing Peter to pay Paul” starts to happen.
All speculation, of course. We’ll keep hearing about this one for some time b