On Dec.1, 2016, Nova Scotia's Royal Gazette announced she was changing her name from Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Griffith to her current name, Jennifer Kathleen Margaret Robertson. They settled on a customized Jeanneau 51 with a pink and cream interior: three cabins, a dining area for six, a dishwasher, a gas stove, a washer and dryer, an en suite bathroom with standing shower, and a swim platform with teak battens. OFFICE SPACE Early on, Robertson was also processing funds acting as a funnel for customer money on behalf of QuadrigaCX. The Instagram account belonging to Jennifer Robertson showed that since 2016 shed taken trips to Macchu Pichu, Dubai, Oman, Myanmar, the Maldives, and Rio de Janeiro, often in private jets. After Cotten's death, she agreed to forfeit $12 million in assets that included vehicles and real estate. We now know that Cotten began, no later than 2015, to steal his clients funds. He might even be eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. By that point, however, a new Gerald Cotten venture was already six months old. We thought, finallyGerry is standing up to Mike. In 2010 he graduated with a bachelors degree in business administration from an honors program at York Universitys Schulich School of Business in Toronto. As a result, Jennifer had to deal with the legal ramifications. Small said exhuming the body would be one way to lay those theories to rest. She said she wants to move on with her life and hopes her new book, BitCoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions, is the final chapter of the Quadrigascandal. The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. It was also revealed that Cotten had written his will just four days before leaving for India. There were further questions regarding Jennifer changing her name from Griffith to Forgeron and then to Robertson. Most of the homes are in metro Halifax. If Quadriga was conceived as a scam, what kind of scam was it? How could a seemingly healthy young man die suddenly from complications with Crohn's disease? On their honeymoon in India, they intended to visit Robertson and Gerald Cotten House in Jaipur. Subsequently the brothers would gain Twitter notoriety for their incessant attacks on Donald Trump before they were shut down for operating fake accounts and purchasing followers.) Quadrigas entire board resigned, leaving Cotten as Quadrigas only full-time employee. He was a founder and the CEO of Quadriga, Canadas dominant Bitcoin exchangesomething like TD Ameritrade for cryptocurrency. Gerald Cotten's widow, Jennifer Robertson, said he was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at the age of 24, about a year after he co-founded QuadrigaCX with his partner Mike Patryn. It was the behavior of a doomed gambler employing the martingale strategy, successively doubling down in a desperate effort to get back to zero, until he had dug a hole so deep that he could only be buried inside it. He claimed he wrote his passwords on paper and locked them in a safe deposit box at a bank, because thats the best way to keep coins secure. Shortly before his death, according to two Quadriga associates, Cotten told close friends and family that Quadriga had a dead mans switch that would send them access to the exchanges funds in the case of his disappearance or death. He neglected to disclose, however, that he filled those fake accounts with invented funds, trading counterfeit Bitcoin for real Bitcoin and Canadian and American dollars. Every Bitcoin transaction appears in a public ledgerthe blockchainthat can be consulted by anybody with internet access. Jennifer Robertson became the focus of a lot of suspicious chatter online after her husband died and his company collapsed, exposing a $200-million fraud. It was a terrible, terrible moment," she said. He was not an evil dude, said Freddie Heartline, a founder of the Bitcoin Co-op, when asked about the missing millions. Sometimes hed say he was Michael from Pakistan. "I saw Gerry die, I was holding his hand when he passed away. But when she met Cotten at the Toronto Bitcoin hub Decentral, she found him funny and sweet. Just days before they left, Cotten made out a will, leaving everything to Robertson, except for $100,000 he left to take care of his two dogs. In April 2013, around the time that Cotten appeared in Vancouver, the price of a Bitcoin had risen to $266. If you blur your eyes, this narrativeGerry Tries to Make Goodnearly coheres. When Cotten died, Jennifer and Cotten tied the knot a little earlier. They know where their money is going. Quadriga launched on Boxing Day. I was one of five nonwhites working in capital markets in Vancouver.) Patryn shortly resumed posting on TalkGold and other HYIP forums and opened a series of businesses that brokered digital currencies. It was the largest online money-laundering case in American history: Liberty Reserves 5.5 million user accounts had conducted 78 million transactions worth more than $8 billion. Gerry was a very careful person who well understood the need to back up ones private keys. Once he left it behind on the Gulliver, which caused a momentary hysteria as the yacht had already departed the dock. J ennifer Robertson was widowed when Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, died suddenly in India in December, leaving behind a business in chaos and as much as $180 million of cryptocurrency. Cotten had mentioned having a safe bolted to the rafters in the attic of his home in which he had stored the passwords to his various cryptocurrency accounts. Robertson said "everything was crazy" after Cotten died andher lawyers were the ones who decided to wait weeks before letting investors know about Cotten's death. He also accepted cash deposits. But it came from a place of organizationhe knew what he was doing. He cleared trees and built a house, though he had no apparent plans to move in. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange, and had to be funded by sending a bank wire to Japan. Furthermore, Gerry signed his will less than two weeks before his death, leaving all of his assets to Jennifer. The widow of the man behind what was once Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange is finally sharing her side of the story afterhis suddendeath three years ago. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. Much of Quadrigas riseand Bitcoinshad been fueled by speculation from greenhorns who had heard something exciting about cryptocurrency from their nephew or cable news. They asked me about 20 times if he was alive, says one witness who has intimate knowledge of Quadrigas workings and has been questioned by both agencies. Less than three months later, the Quadriga Fund was dead, and Quadriga CX went live. Nobody followed up with him. Patryn, though six years older than Cotten, was only 21. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia; their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon. It put strangers at ease; it made him seem lighthearted. They always end our conversations with that question. QCXINT, the creditor and blockchain expert, said that the FBIs Vander Veer told him that with hundreds of millions of dollars missing and no body, its an open question. The only way to verify that the body Robertson brought home from India was Cotten is to exhume it. (For his part, Patryn says he hasnt seen any reason to think that [Cotten] is alive.). Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6. On Facebook he posed with a tiger, a lion, behind the wheel of a Lamborghini, straddling an ATV in a desert. Soon they were responding to each others public posts with inside jokes. But in February 2018, his. In 2018 she helped lead a team of reporters and editors to win the RTDNA Ron Laidlaw Continuing Coverage Award for work on the Deep Trouble series. She was apologetic about people losing their money, saying, I would have never, ever stolen from other people. Gerry the Mastermind might think he will get away with it. He wore a wrinkled golf shirt, cargo shorts, and beat-up Birkenstocks, and he was obscenely young, with sandy hair and pale skin that appeared not to have seen sunlight since puberty. Most of these early acolytes were drawn to the digital currencys libertarian ethos, its promises of decentralization, transparency, speed, and independence from governments and financial institutions. In February 2019, Jennifer insisted she was not privy to the companys business, asserting that Gerry was solely responsible for its dealings. Jennifer Robertson, the widow of QuadrigaCX founder Gerald (Gerry) Cotten, will be allowed to keep more than $90,000 cash and a Jeep Cherokee in a settlement agreement with the company's bankruptcy trustee. Canadian Press. Within months, things went from bad to worse for everyone involved. He might still be collaborating with Patryn, or Patryn might be trying to track him down in a final act of Con vs. Con. Which meant that Cotten was not really who he said he was either. The media dragged Gerald Cotten's wife, Jennifer Robertson, into the spotlight after his mysterious death. She lives in Halifax. The broad outlines of his story were blandly conventional, at least if you subtracted his interest in decentralized monetary systems. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple youd less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. After he squandered what remained in Quadrigas coffers, the price of Bitcoin plunged, and there was a run on the exchange. Four desks in a weird room, no business operations going on. Midas Gold, which had begun to accept Bitcoin, was seized too. Jennifer Robertson, whose husband Gerald Cotten died aged 30 during their honeymoon in India in 2018, opened up about her ordeal in a new book, Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions. The RCMP, which has jurisdiction over the case, has thus far not done so. "I would have never, ever stolen from other people. He saw himself as an enforcerof rules, of integrity, of loyalty. The following afternoon Robertson returned with the body to Canada. We didnt want to cast doubt on our own scene. Gerald Cottenwas just 30whenhedied in India in December 2018. Patryn made people uncomfortable. Creditors began to ask questions online about the authenticity of the formal documents in a country notorious for the ease at which falsified documents can be purchased, particularly after they learned that the death certificate misspelled Cottens name, and that the former chairman and managing director of the company that ran the hospital had been convicted of financial fraud two months earlier. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. On his personal YouTube channel (account name Gerryrulz) he had posted several dozen homemade videos as infantile as they were portentous: Gerry incinerating a $20 bill in his microwave; Gerry knocking over a Jenga tower with a giant teddy bear; Gerry stuck in an amusement park maze, repeating the same mistakes, unable to escape.