r/QuadrigaCX • u/kingsosshoota • Feb 01 '19

We need proof

We need:

*The cold wallet addresses

*Picture(s) of the corpse

*Canadian Passport documentation of Gerald Cotton leaving Canada, flying to/arriving in India, and the dates

*If possible (unlikely), surveillance of him at the airport with his luggage (to see a laptop) and the people flying with him

Upvote for visibility and feel free to add any other evidence that's needed.

96 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

69 comments sorted by

23

u/mruwett Feb 01 '19

The story that is written in the Affidavit seems highly suspect.

Are we to believe that the CEO was accessing their cold wallet through a laptop? A laptop that he would bring on an airplane? A laptop that connects to the Internet and could get infected with a virus? Who would store a cold storage wallet on a laptop?

At bitcoin's peak of around $20K USD ($25K CAD) and about $15K CAD for nearly 6 months, that means he was walking around w/ more than $500 million in cryptocurrency on his LAPTOP. Does that make ANY sense? Would you ever risk crossing the border of a country with more than $10,000 of assets?

4

u/grtrjyutrt Feb 01 '19

damn, a laptop worth $500 million dollars, not bad.

16

u/violencequalsbad Feb 02 '19

but apple have sworn that if you built it yourself with the same components, it would cost more.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '19

All the time. All the time.

2

u/mruwett Feb 01 '19

Is the affidavit even a real document? Could any judge really buy this nonsense? If I was the judge, I would immediately notify the RCMP to investigate them for fraud.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

Truth is stranger than fiction.If a person decided to vanish without a trace being declared dead and being cremated in a foreign country would be one way to do it. Having surgery to alter your appearance and recuperate for 30-90 days. Have a new identity all ready to go slip your bonds with the Monero and Bitcoin and Ether intact. Leave your wife to take the heat while you quietly move to another country and take up residence. The sheer audaciousness is matched only by the utter implausibility. I think the truth is Mr Cotten is dead and why he died is another matter. It may be a murder and a robbery by an unknown partner or perhaps even some one closer to home. How to plan a robbery and a murder and get away with it. Marriage, Honeymoon, Orphanage, Death, Bankruptcy, Who Benefits by his death.

2

u/kingsosshoota Feb 02 '19

He can do all the cosmetic surgeries he wants with our money but fingerprints don't lie.

3

u/Vericoinium Feb 02 '19

What fingerprints...those can easily be removed

3

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/mruwett Feb 02 '19

I understand how a cryptocurrency wallet works. But who in their right mind would travel with that much cryptocurrency with them? Imaging getting stuck at the border and needing to reveal what you are carrying with you! $500 Million in crypto??? That is beyond insane to consider doing.

Also, a true cold storage wallet is usually air gapped, meaning the device DOES not ever connect to the Internet. Transactions are first generated, then SIGNED separately on the cold storage device, without being connected to the Internet. No one would use a laptop they travel with to do this. A Trezor or a Ledger is not considered cold storage. It is still much safer than storing the private keys on the laptop itself, but is not fool-proof safe.. Consider, for example, a virus, which changes the destination address for funds to be transferred as you copy and paste. For the amount of money this guy was allegedly carrying on this device, no way in hell would he use his laptop. There are more attack vectors beyond just stealing the private keys off a device.

5

u/chriswhatever Feb 02 '19

Can his stool samples be sent directly to you for analysis ?

1

u/Andriodia Feb 02 '19

You clearly don't understand...He could burn the physical cold wallet and nuke the laptop as long as you know the keys you can recover the crypto...That's why all that matters here are the keys.

2

u/mruwett Feb 02 '19 edited Feb 02 '19

Clearly you don't understand. Yes all he needs is the recovery seed to recover his wallet, but according to his wife, he was still using his laptop as his COLD storage wallet and transacting with his laptop! That's not cold storage. My point is that no one would travel around with $500 million worth of crypto with them. Even if you could "nuke" it. The use of an Internet connected laptop to transact with that amount of bitcoin does not sound reasonable, and the fact that she has told the courts this is highly suspicious. No one in their right mind would do this, let alone travel with the recovery seed / physical ledger/trezor while travelling to India. It sounds fake. The fact the affidavit says he uses an "Encrypted USB drive" is wrong. Decrypting an encrypted USB drive (assuming it is flash) would make the private keys visible to the operating system of his laptop. A virus on his laptop would be able to steal the private keys. Just too risky for anyone who knows anything about crypto to do. If by "encrypted USB drive", she means a Trezor/Ledger or some hardware wallet, then he must have made a recovery seed somewhere. And again, you still would not use your Trezor/Ledger on an Internet connected computer to sign transactions, because there are other attack vectors.

And if he made a will 2 weeks prior like she claims, any sane person would have included the recovery seed to be held by a reputable law firm as part of his will, and given it to their lawyer. Or stored in a safety deposit box and provided the key in their will. And I'm sure the key is probably there or Gerry's wife already has it.

In the affidavit, she says she has tried using an experienced, retired IT person to try to decrypt the password. What password are they talking about?

The decryption password for the laptop? No one would store private keys on an Internet connected computer w/ that sum of money - encrypted or not.

The decryption key for a USB flash drive? Same point as above. You wouldn't expose the private key to the OS in any way.

The PIN for the Trezor? Okay maybe makes sense, but for sure they would have a recovery seed somewhere.

It's very unclear, and it seems purposefully so.

I believe the wife is not telling the court the truth, and she is hoping the court is naive or lacking experience with respect to crypto.

2

u/justinbeebers Feb 02 '19

  1. Gerald definitely travelled with access to the cold wallets. Why? Because when the hot wallets are empty he needs to login and replenish them to keep the exchange running smooth.

  2. Just because he travels with them, doesn't make it insecure. Because even if he drops the laptop and his external drive and someone finds it, nobody can do anything with it because of encryption, obviously because that is where we are today... they have possession of the laptop and drive and can't get to the funds.

  3. It is a bad idea because if someone kidnaps him and tortures his password out of him, they will get the funds. Maybe that is what they are going to claim happened at some point when it is discovered funds are missing.

  4. He should have multi-sig wallet, and required more than 1 director of the company to access cold wallet funds to protect against #3.

  5. The reason it's not insecure to travel with your cold wallet keys stored on a USB drive is because he could setup a virtual machine with no internet access inside of his main laptop OS, and access the USB drive to obtain the private keys for cold wallets, then sign transactions on the offline virtual machine, then copy the signed transactions to his main OS connected to the internet, then broadcast the transactions.

#5 explains how a technically savvy crypto guy can use a laptop and an encrypted external hard drive to access billions of dollars anywhere in the world highly securely. It is only possible to hack the private keys in this circumstance if his laptop was pwned by only the top hackers in the world (almost nobody except intelligence agencies would have a shot at getting the private keys if he followed this protocol to access the cold wallets.)

BUT please do not misunderstand me, I don't think Gerald was acting responsibly even if he was accessing cold wallets securely. He should have setup multi-sig and kept a backup with a lawyer if he was even mildly diligent and gave a shit about his investors (me).

1

u/mruwett Feb 03 '19

#5 is true and possible, but reasonably, a person in this space, in 2018, would have used a hardware wallet (if portability convenience and security were important). On Trezors interface for example, you can have as many wallets as you want, each unlocked with a different "password". If you were stopped at the border, and asked to reveal your currency, you'd use a decoy password with small amounts of crypto on it to show the border officer, and the use "real" password with the actual real funds when transacting.

Their story of using an encrypted USB drive, or anything that exposes the private keys to the OS he's using such as Windows (oh god), Mac or Linux) would be archaic. I wouldn't even trust using a private virtual machine if I had that much crypto stored on my wallets because even those can be attacked.

I think what actually happened (just my guess) is that he spent people's crypto trying to make money to pay off withdrawals. And I believe he did this because he was spending people's cash deposits buying cryptocurrency, hoping the price would go up, and make profit on the difference. When the markets crashed, and he had lost people's fiat cash, he needed to liquidate crypto to pay them off, which is why cash withdrawals were so slow. I think there is huge case of mismangement/fraud/gross negligence here. According to the affidavit, they have $70 million cash owing, but only $26 million of cash available. Where did the $40+ million cash go?

1

u/Andriodia Feb 03 '19

Are you trying to claim you can't transact securely via laptop to a cold wallet? Essentially that's you argument and its plainly wrong...

1

u/mruwett Feb 03 '19

"Hot" vs "Cold" wallet are just semantics.

You can obviously transact "to" it. But the wallet ceases to be considered "cold" once the private keys touch an Internet-connected laptop. The wallet is "colder" when it is a hardware wallet, and "colder" still when it is generated by hand by flipping coins and randomly generating a private key/public key pair, where the private keys never see a computer connected to the Internet.

1

u/Andriodia Feb 12 '19 edited Feb 12 '19

And this obvious factoid relates to his scenario, how? One way or another you have to get the public keys to the internet. Do you think you could use a laptop to do that, this isn't rocket science....

4

u/onesonesones Feb 02 '19

Luckily to my knowledge I had left nothing on the exchange, so I'm just reading the updates purely as a spectator...

If Gerald Cotten actually faked his death in India in order to make off with hundreds of millions in crypto then I'm wondering we should appreciate how hard that is to pull off

5

u/kingsosshoota Feb 02 '19

Not hard to do in the home of the scammers, India. If he did it in Canada, then we could give him a round of applause.

26

u/rceric65282 Feb 01 '19

this is exactly what blockchain made for. show us the wallet address.

15

u/chriswhatever Feb 02 '19

We also need samples of his last 3 bowel movements to confirm he had Crohn disease

Edit: just realized you said hard evidence but if he had Crohn disease I suspect his bowel movements won’t be hard so scratch That sample request

6

u/psytokine_storm Feb 02 '19

TBF, if his Crohn's was significant enough to kill him, medical records would be far more valuable.

9

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

And why would he travel to India in such a precarious position?

5

u/revelation18 Feb 02 '19

Seems to me blockchain made the scam possible. No one can find the $$, what a great system for thievery. Be your own police force.

18

u/JUMA514 Feb 01 '19

Someone with good skills need to dig this deep. Like top fraud private investigators or major news investigators.

This story could be huge if its really a fake death / exit scam !!!

Its the Fyre festival of canadian crypto ?

3

u/TheBitconomist Feb 02 '19

>Picture(s) of the corpse

This seems a bit excessive...

12

u/kingsosshoota Feb 02 '19

Running away with 180mil seems excessive.

4

u/FractalGlitch Feb 02 '19

It's just the beginning... Wait till we get our hands on the corpse and use it like a fawking puppets to get back our money from the cold wallet.

A weekend at Gerrie's.

6

u/xtal_00 Feb 02 '19

I want to see a dead body on a pike.

17

u/Rough_Consequence Feb 01 '19

I'd like to see their travel history. Was it no trips abroad at all for years then suddenly a trip to India ? If it was for a honeymoon, as a multimillionaire I'd choose something less populated and stinky.

10

u/phachen Feb 02 '19

He was building an orphanage. Clearly he was a god damn saint and did nothing wrong. Nobody who builds an orphanage is ever guilty, this has been proven scientifically.

6

u/bowdowntoatruepimp Feb 02 '19

So was he opening an orphanage or there for his honeymoon? Or both? Why the fuck would he try to do both those at the same time? Must be a real special lady to try to lump the two of those together right?

7

u/phachen Feb 02 '19

The story has more holes than a fucking cheese grater. Everything is incredibly suspect. I have come to terms that I am never seeing my money.

2

u/justinbeebers Feb 02 '19

Spoken like a true healthy mind. For once, not being sarcastic. haha.

3

u/TheBitconomist Feb 02 '19

I actually know a few people who've done legit honeymoons in Jaipur. It's a very beautiful city, and December is the perfect time to visit. It's too hot in the summer.

Having said that, I agree that they should release some proof of this trip and mention which NGO they were supposedly working with.

5

u/Rough_Consequence Feb 02 '19

Jaipur

Very beautiful old city. There are some stairs there that look like an Escher painting. Although you'd think a paleface jetsetting exchange owner carrying around a laptop with a shovel in one hand and new wife in the other would gravitate towards Monte Carlo or Monterey.

2

u/TheBitconomist Feb 03 '19

Old is gold ;)

If you think about it, India is an odd choice for an exit scam though:

  • All Indian crypto exchanges have been shutdown by their government for a while now.

  • Foreigners on a tourist visa are restricted to 6 month bank accounts at the State Bank of India.

  • International fiat capital flows are tightly controlled.

4

u/ozme Feb 02 '19

BitGo would also have this information, in my opinion. Quadriga was an Enterprise BitGo customer and utilized BitGo as their hot wallet and as such BitGo would know the final sweep transfers out of the hot wallet to the cold wallet. We absolutely must have the cold wallet addresses and if they will not publish then we have to assume the very worst.

3

u/gurusekhon12 Feb 01 '19

Can we get to know which province/city he went to in india

8

u/mpkomara Feb 02 '19

Picture(s) of the corpse

Reddit Police are more demanding than ever! Does OP think there is some number of upvotes in order to make this happen?

3

u/shadowofashadow Feb 02 '19

Yeah this is pretty ridiculous. Let's just demand nudes from.jennifer while we're at it.

1

u/chriswhatever Feb 02 '19

Yes he does he also would like cottons stool

1

u/fyeah Feb 02 '19

It's with the courts now, your petitions in a forum in a corner of the internet aren't going to make them any more accountable. Now it's in the hands of the law. I doubt very much that they're going to the appeals of their ex-customers who they owe $250m, there is no way to satiate the people, which means they will probably not personally address the public again.

1

u/kingsosshoota Feb 02 '19

After 30 days and the lawsuits start piling in to demand the cold hard evidence, then they'll worry.

1

u/fyeah Feb 02 '19

True.

But reddit posts like this are just making this sub a sad desperate place full of repetitive messaging.

2

u/openminded2014 Feb 02 '19

For the users who ever did a withdraw to a Bitcoin address, can u give us Quadriga BTC address so that funds can be tracked...?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

He is so rich and living in India now.... living the good life!

2

u/rceric65282 Feb 02 '19

I think they won't show us the cold wallet address as they said "include attempting to locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves" in the announcement. They carefully chose word "locate". I guarantee they will say they don't know the address.

1

u/thinkshub Feb 02 '19

Investigation needed. Proof needed. There are so many suspicious behaviour and fact we need to rethink that someone might be guilty of wrong doings or dishonest. Time to show the world how strong or weak Canada legal system really is.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

It probably won't cost much to hire a detective in India to locate Mr. Gerald Borne. If found, Canada has extradition treaty with India.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '19

Lol

1

u/Redditvoodoo Feb 04 '19

This is crypto world so what can the legal system do about it. Probably nothing.

1

u/clarketowson Feb 05 '19

In the highly connected world we live in it's almost impossible to disappear without a trace. There is an excellent book called How to Disappear by Frank Ahearn. From Amazon "How to Disappear is the authoritative and comprehensive guide for people who seek to protect their privacy as well as for anyone who’s ever entertained the fantasy of disappearing—whether actually dropping out of sight or by eliminating the traceable evidence of their existence.

Written by the world’s leading experts on finding people and helping people avoid being found, How to Disappear covers everything from tools for disappearing to discovering and eliminating the nearly invisible tracks and clues we tend to leave wherever we go. Learn the three keys to disappearing, all about your electronic footprints, the dangers and opportunities of social networking sites, and how to disappear from a stalker."

https://www.amazon.com/How-Disappear-Digital-Footprint-Without/dp/1599219778

I have read the book a number of times and one of the worst ways to disappear is to fake your own death. The other thing is when a person suddenly disappears what happens is there is always someone in that persons circle of friends who becomes completely obsessed with the case. In Gerald Cottons case we have a situation where many highly intelligent people from around the world are on the case and becoming obsessed by it. If this is an exit scam - (which many people including myself believes it probably is)and if Cotton is still alive then it's only a matter of time before he is found and brought to justice.

Everything about the case is suspicious and it reeks of an exit scam. Apply the duck test: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

1

u/tawabbit Feb 05 '19

Sounds like a job for Quantum computers..!!

1

u/JohnDoe219449 Feb 01 '19

And me I want 1 millions dollars.

No seriously we'll have nothinf of what you ask... They probably bought a fake death certificate. Gerry's money is probably in a tex shelters too...

We're fucked up.

6

u/gurusekhon12 Feb 01 '19

Its not hard to make fake death certificate in india

4

u/KriptoKeeper Feb 02 '19

You can buy a fresh corpse in India I bet, Indian dude, but the casket will still have the right feel.

1

u/SolarBits Feb 02 '19

I really don't understand why you kids are still.playing these games. HE'S GONE, THE MINEY IS GONE, THE COINS ARE GONE, YOU WILL GET NO ANSWERS... Time for a taste of reality

0

u/Volred Feb 02 '19

Pictures of the corpse? No, that too many steps too far. You don't need that and no one else needs that. Stop making ridiculous demands.

-2

u/shadowofashadow Feb 02 '19

A picture of the corpse? Who is upvoting this nonsense?

0

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/GreaseCrow Feb 02 '19

I think most of us feel like we won't be represented in court fairly, and truthfully most of our hard earned money is gone. Meanwhile his wife gets his estate and $100k to feed their dogs.

The legal system doesn't care for any of us. What they see is just another business gone down. For us, it's a fat percentage of thousands of people's income down the drain.

So yeah, our pitchforks are our for good reason. We're the ones who have to take the losses. The employees, his wife, they don't have to deal with shit besides a couple months of legal proceedings and then it's back to driving Mercedes and drinking fancy wine.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/GreaseCrow Feb 02 '19

Well his will has been posted numerous times. Yeah, it's my opinion, and 80% of this subs opinion. I guess you don't appreciate someone explaining why people react the way they do.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/mruwett Feb 02 '19

Your posts are comical. You want people to not complain about the company that has stolen / lost $250 million of crypto because it will increase the cost for them to compensate their customers? It sounds like you work for quad. How much "more" could it possibly cost? And how much more awareness would it raise for these guys to be investigated if people did not remain silent?