Gerry Cotten passed away in 2018 at only 30-years-old.
However, Cotten's passing was more than just an unexpected tragedy because it cost thousands
of people their life savings.
The loss added up to over 200 million Canadian Dollars, or about 137 million American, all
because Cotten forgot to write down his crypto password before he died.
Some online sleuths speculate that Cotten never actually passed.
Instead, they think he faked it so he could steal his client's money.
In all honesty, no one is 100% sure Cotten is dead or alive.
The ambiguity caused a massive debate amongst true-crime sleuths, especially after the Netflix
documentary Trust No One came out in March 2022.
The documentary chose to hop on the skeptical side of the fence and frame the theory as
a conspiracy.
However, it's not that simple.
There's a serious lack of evidence for both sides, which has led to other wild theories
growing on the internet like weeds.
Some believe, for example, that Cotten's wife poisoned him for the money.
Others say the mob had him whacked.
Both theories are just a bit on the fringe.
Instead, let's focus on the two primary theories and the bizarre, stranger than fiction events
that led up to them.
It all started with Quadriga, Cotten's crypto-focused magnum opus.
He founded the company in 2013 alongside the ever-shady Michael Patryn.
Supposedly, Patryn handled the business side of things while Cotten handled the tech production.
Cotten was a huge computer nerd, and his friends, family, and coworkers describe him as such.
According to Quadriga lore, Cotten had a vision for the future of crypto in his home country
of Canada.
Cotten wanted to create an investment platform for crypto enthusiasts that offered both lucrative
investment opportunities and trading options.
The company focused primarily on exchanging bitcoin, which climbed in popularity back
in 2013.
Shortly after Quadriga's founding, Cotten's vision came to light when it became Canada's
number one bitcoin exchange.
On the surface, Quadriga was booming.
They had over 100,000 investors and traders, a large group by crypto standards.
However, one must dive into Cotten's personal life to find the real evidence of success—evidence
of him and his wife, Jennifer, living like Crypto royalty.
Cotten and Jennifer stayed together for a few years before he got big.
Jennifer, or Jen, was a property manager and chihuahua enthusiast.
She had two little dogs named Nitro and Gully.
Together, Cotten, Jen, and their two fur babies made a lovely, unconventional family of four.
They did almost everything together.
They traveled together, managed money together, and bought expensive things together—lots
of expensive things.
Cotten and Jen owned what you'd call the big 5: mansions, cars, private jets, yachts, and
private islands, all paid for with Quadriga money.
His main home was in the middle of a forested neighborhood in Halifax, Canada.
It wasn't huge—only 3 bedrooms—but the area was beautiful, with tall green trees
and pristine dark lakes.
Cotten stayed there when he wasn't working or traveling.
Still, he traveled a lot, often with Jen and the chihuahuas.
The family spent a lot of time in Kelowna, the heart of British Columbia's wine country
in western Canada.
Cotten bought a home there and another house—his third—in Calgary.
Cotten bought and built his fourth house the summer he went missing.
Sadly, he never lived there while he was alive.
He built the house on a private island he purchased in Mahone Bay, which is off the
coast of Nova Scotia in North Eastern Canada.
He'd bought a $600,000 sailboat yacht he planned on using to traverse the Eastern coast, possibly
down to the Caribbean.
He named it the Gulliver, after the literary character famous for sailing to strange lands.
Before he passed, Cotten had just enough time—about a year—to sail the Gulliver around Mahone
Bay with Jen, Nitro, and Gully, who enjoyed sitting on deck under the sun.
The yacht had dining for 6, 3 cabins, a stove, dishwasher, and a bathroom with a stand-in
shower.
If Cotten wasn't sailing, he was in the air.
He owned a Cessna 400, rented helicopters, and kept a collection of drones.
When he wasn't sailing or flying, Cotten either drove his Lexus, Jeep, or—his personal favorite—one
of his Teslas.
Cotten was a big fan of electric vehicles and anything innovative that challenged the
status quo.
His love for disruptive tech eventually led Cotten to bitcoin.
He followed crypto from the beginning, in 2009 and 2010, back when bitcoin was just
getting started in the tech world.
A young, college-aged Cotton attended meetings at coffee shops and dorm rooms to learn more
about this new digital currency.
He liked how the government or other financial institutions didn't control bitcoin.
Crypto isn't controlled by anyone except the individual, who can buy and sell the currency
without worrying about government intervention.
But most of all, Cotten was intrigued by the investment opportunities.
He saw how easy it was to trade bitcoin through different currency exchanges and how lucrative
it was as an appreciating digital asset.
In other words, bitcoin would make some smart people a lot of money.
Cotten planned on being one of those smart people.
He created Quadriga for people like him who loved crypto and all the money-making opportunities
it offered those brave enough to take it on.
Quadriga was an easy, efficient way to buy and sell crypto.
They were the first exchange to earn a money services business license from FinTRAC, Canada's
foremost anti-money laundering authority.
On paper, business was going great.
Things changed when Cotten went to India.
According to reports, Cotten started experiencing stomach pains right after he and Jen checked
into the hotel.
The newlyweds had just said their vows, but instead of going to Bali or the Bahamas, Cotten
and Jennifer went to India.
They were there to have fun and build an orphanage for children in need.
Despite the generous nature of his visit, Cotten was still spending quite a bit of change.
Their hotel, the Oberoi Rajvilas, is a 5-star establishment.
The suite Cotten picked out costs around $932 a night.
The trip was supposed to be the happiest time of Cotten's life: a luxurious experience coupled
with charitable giving.
Instead, Cotten found himself in a nearby hospital having his stomach tested by doctors.
The results came back with some bad news: Cotten had traveler's diarrhea.
According to medical records, his symptoms stemmed from Crohn's Disease.
According to Jen, doctors diagnosed Cotten with Crohn's disease several years prior.
Crohn's causes bowel inflammation, leading to chronic stomach pain, diarrhea, and gas
pains.
However, this pain was more than just the usual inflammation.
Cotten's stomach only got worse the next day.
According to his blood work, Cotten's gut went into septic shock, meaning some of his
organs shut down.
Not long after that, he went into cardiac arrest, not once, but twice!
Doctors say they tried to revive him twice.
However, their efforts weren't enough to save Cotten, who passed away at 7:26 PM, December
9th, 2018.
On December 10th, Jennifer flew back home to Canada with her husband's body after it
was embalmed in India.
Four days later, Jennifer held a funeral for her late husband.
Several people spoke about their friend, coworker, and business associate.
Michael Patryn, Cotten's longtime business partner, called him his little brother.
It all sounds like a tragic ending to a successful young life.
But many people, especially the 115,000 victims, think there's much more to Cotten's alleged
passing than meets the eye.
Emphasis on alleged.
All of Cotten's investors woke up one morning to the same reality: they no longer had access
to their Quadriga investments.
Around 215 million Canadian Dollars had suddenly disappeared, with no way to bring it back.
Instead, the money existed in limbo.
If Cotten was still alive, it was his to play with.
If he wasn’t, nobody could ever get it back.
Jennifer says she looked all over the house but found no written passwords.
There was nothing on Cotten's computer, nor were any external hard drives lying around.
If you're confused about how someone could lose their account password, then let us explain.
You need an extremely complicated, one-of-a-kind key code to access your crypto.
Most people often stored it on a hard drive that isn't accessible by anyone else.
And the only person who knew how to access Quadriga's investment data died in India from
"complications of Crohn's disease."
In 2014, Cotten claims he wrote down all his crypto passwords in case of disaster.
A former associate says it was "out of character" for Cotten not to write his passwords down.
Many of Quadriga's investors agreed: the lost password was strange.
One investor named Ali Mousavi told Netflix he felt something was off about the whole
situation.
He, alongside the other tens of thousands of investors, decided to investigate the matter.
The first fact they found occurred just weeks before Cotten left for India.
According to court records, Cotten wrote a will nine days before he died.
After his passing, the will went into effect: Jennifer received the bulk of his $12 million
real estate portfolio, his plane, his Lexus, and the yacht.
Nitro and Gully, the couple's two chihuahuas, received $100,000 for their long-term care.
It's not uncommon or illogical to make a will before marriage.
However, writing a will just nine days before you die is odd or at the very least, coincidental.
The online sleuths found some issues with the events immediately after his passing to
make matters more suspicious.
Before Cotten's body was embalmed and shipped off to Canada, someone sent it to the hotel.
In India, bodies must go right to the Embalmer from the hospital.
It's standard procedure.
For example, hotel security guards from the hotel tried sending Cotten's body to the Mahatma
Gandhi Medical College and Hospital.
However, the hospital refused to embalm Cotten's body since it wasn't coming from another hospital.
Documents reveal that the guards took Cotten's body to a government-run hospital, where they
apparently don't ask as many questions.
The body was supposedly embalmed there and flown to Canada.
Then, they put Cotten's body in a closed casket for the funeral so no one could see who was
inside the coffin, which means Jeniffer was the only one to see his body.
The only proof they had was a death certificate created in India.
However, as the sleuths discovered, Indian death certificates are easy to forge.
This circumstantial evidence led many investors to a wild conclusion: Cotten faked his passing.
But there was much more to their theory than that.
The legion of sleuths realized something else pretty quickly during their investigation.
They were ignored when trying to withdraw money from their Quadriga accounts.
Once they started messaging back and forth, they realized that they all had the same problem.
Tong Zhou is a software designer from San Francisco.
The former Quadriga investor says he lost $400,000 in the Quadriga scam.
He said in the Netflix documentary that he tried to pull his money out in October of
2018.
However, no one from Quadriga ever responded to his emails.
Even if they had Cotten's password, they couldn't have given Zhou his money?
Why?
Because there was no money.
Cotten had been running a Ponzi scheme for years, long before Quadriga.
At just 15-years-old, Cotten started his scheme on the now-defunct website TalkGold.
The scheme was called S&S Investments and "guaranteed" a 150% return in less than two
days.
S&S collapsed three months after all the investors' money mysteriously disappeared.
Despite the short-lived success, Cotten remained on TalkGold long enough to meet his future
partner, Michael Paylin.
For years the two tech-savvy scammers, mainly Cotten, bilked people on the internet using
a guerilla warfare style of scamming.
Cotten founded a small fund, accumulated bits of capital, then peeled out with the victims'
money.
These schemes were profitable but small enough to keep him off the Fed's radar.
Eventually, Paylin and Cotten decided to team up for something much bigger: a crypto exchange
called QuadrigaCX.
Cotten ran the exchange like his own personal casino.
Financial records show that Cotten made big bets on dangerous coins like Doge, OmiseGo,
Zcash, and lost.
When he wasn't making bad trades, Cotten spent their money on personal luxuries—luxuries
he gave to his wife and chihuahuas.
The only thing he left behind for his clients was a conspiracy theory for them to investigate.
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And let us know in the comment section what you’d rather have right now, a million bucks
in crypto or a million bucks in the stock market?