What really happened to Gerald Cotten? Netflix’s new true crime documentary, Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King, looks at the millionaire’s mysterious death
The Crypto King, aka Gerald “Gerry” Cotten, died in 2018, but his mysterious death is still a subject of controversy today. His death sparked online debates and string theories on Reddit and Telegram that are perpetrated by those who lost most of their life savings to this young techpreneur (over 76,000 customers, according to multiple reports).
Many believed that Cotten faked his own death to abscond with the funds himself and, after further investigations, it was also revealed that his past identity was muddier than we were initially led to believe.
Meet model-turned-cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Lauren Remington Platt
So what exactly happened to Gerald Cotten?
He seemed like a nice guy
As Vanity Fair put it, “Cotten was a computer nerd who had entered the right business at the right time and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.”
How Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban is changing the world
However, his dramatic fall came when cryptocurrency prices crashed in 2018. When his customers tried to withdraw their funds from Quadriga, they were met with dead ends. Things didn’t help when he was reported dead not long after that.
It’s believed that Cotten owed around US$250 million to over 76,000 investors, but unfortunately this sum can only be accessed by Cotten, as he was the only one who had the passwords to the offline cold wallets. In 2019, Quadriga ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy.
He owned an expensive yacht, multiple houses – and an island
While he owes a quarter-million dollars today, Cotten once lived a lavish life during his peak. Vanity Fair reported that he owned a US$600,000 yacht named Gulliver in 2017 that boasted three cabins and a dining area for six.
When it came to property, he and his then-girlfriend Jennifer Robertson lived in a three-bedroom in the posh Fall River area, north of Halifax. Cotten also owned a home in British Columbia’s wine country, Kelowna, and a house in Calgary. If that’s not impressive enough, he also once rented 14 houses in Nova Scotia.
Meet crypto king Zhao Changpeng: ex-McDonald’s worker turned billionaire
For transport, the young cryptocurrency whizz preferred Lexus and a Cessna 400 – a single-engine aeroplane that the publication reported that he’d actually “never tried to fly”.
But perhaps the most OTT fact of them all is that Cotten also owned a 1.6 hectare (four acre) Mahone Bay island.
The strange tale of his death
Many didn’t believe that Cotten really died during his honeymoon in Jaipur, India, after they learned of a number of eyebrow-raising incidents following his death, from a closed casket funeral and no autopsy to his shady ex-business partner Michael Patryn to Cotten’s own dark past revelations involving the dark web and hiring hackers. The mysteries surrounding his death and the missing US$250 million led many to think that Cotten was still alive and in hiding. Internet sleuths even once requested Cotten’s body to be exhumed for an autopsy to confirm its identity and the cause of death.
It didn’t help that, at one point, all evidence pointed to his now-wife Jennifer Robertson. Many accused her of knowing of his whereabouts or even for being responsible for his death, as it was revealed that she received a hefty sum of US$12 million after his death.
Who is Irene Zhao, the Singapore model who made millions selling her NFTs?
Robertson’s error was not announcing Cotten’s death much sooner – it took her a month to do so, which drew more public scrutiny. She once told The Globe and Mail in an interview, “I love the Gerry that I knew. I don’t know who this other person is, but he’s let me down so much.”
If Cotten is still alive, many conspiracy theorists believe that he would have undergone cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance and would be living on an offshore private island relishing his scam money.
But according to an investigation by Canada’s Globe and Mail, Cotten died from complications related to Crohn’s disease and had over US$200 million at the time of his passing. He would have been 33 years old today.
The truth about Quadriga and Cotten’s scams
His scheme went as follows: he took the users’ real dollars (while providing them with fake cryptocurrency funds) and tried to gamble it on other external cryptocurrency sites. Unfortunately, he lost it all and, in the end, there was no money to return to his customer
According to Vanity Fair, at the age of 15 and a half Cotten launched his first pyramid scheme and “promised within ‘48 hours (usually within 18)’ a return of ‘103 to 150 per cent, possibly more’”. Cotten, alongside Patryn, also founded a money-laundering site before QuadrigaCX, taking percentages of each transaction.
The real Cotten was not the man he appeared to be and, just like Tong Zou (one of Quadriga’s many victims) said in the documentary, Cotten’s case is a story of one man’s greed and the ultimate cautionary tale of a classic exit scam.
- Cotten amassed millions from setting up what was once Canada’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, and lived a lavish lifestyle
- After his mysterious death during his honeymoon with wife Jennifer Robertson, investors were left without access to the US$250 million he reportedly stole