The Gerald Cotten Enigma: How a Canadian Crypto Founder Became Crypto's Most Puzzling Exit Scam

When Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly in India in early 2019, the cryptocurrency industry faced an unsettling paradox: Was this the convenient death of a scammer making his escape, or a genuine tragedy that merely coincided with massive fraud? The QuadrigaCX collapse would become crypto’s most intriguing mystery—one that reveals something equally troubling about the intersection of ambition, deception, and addiction in digital finance.

The disappearance of 69,000 bitcoins from Africrypt the previous year had already signaled a disturbing pattern. Since Bitcoin’s emergence, the crypto industry has suffered countless “exit scams,” where exchange operators or project founders vanish with customer assets. But the QuadrigaCX case would prove far more complex than a simple theft.

A Death That Raised Too Many Questions

QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange at the time, shocked customers and regulators alike when it disclosed, months after the fact, that founder Gerald Cotten had passed away during his travels to India. The exchange claimed his death from complications of Crohn’s disease had severed access to the cold storage wallets protecting approximately $145 million in customer cryptocurrencies. With no access to customer funds, QuadrigaCX spiraled into bankruptcy.

But skepticism erupted immediately. Angry customers and determined journalists began digging into the narrative, uncovering inconsistencies that painted a far different picture of who Gerald Cotten actually was. Could a founder who had allegedly died have actually orchestrated an elaborate disappearance? The questions multiplied: Why had his will been signed just two weeks before his fateful trip to India? Why did it include C$100,000 bequeathed to his two dogs? Why had he taken flying lessons in recent months?

The investigation that followed—beautifully documented in the eight-part podcast “Exit Scam” produced by Aaron Lammer—would suggest an answer that defied simple categorization: Gerald Cotten was simultaneously a genuine casualty and a genuine criminal.

Gerald Cotten’s Double Life: The Criminal Before the Mystery

The investigation by Lammer and journalist Amy Castor revealed something startling: Gerald Cotten had never been the trustworthy, soft-spoken businessman his public image suggested. His criminal history stretched back to adolescence, beginning at age 15 when he entered the murky world of online high-yield investment programs (HYIPs)—essentially unregistered Ponzi schemes where participants promised extraordinary returns.

It was through HYIPs that Cotten first encountered digital currency. Years before Bitcoin even existed, he was collaborating with future QuadrigaCX co-founder Michael Patryn (whose real name was later revealed to be Omar Dhanani, following his conviction for identity fraud and federal prison time in the U.S.) to help HYIP operators manage and move eGold, a gold-backed digital token that the FBI would eventually shut down for enabling money laundering.

By the time Cotten co-founded QuadrigaCX, his experience with deception was already decades in the making. Yet he maintained an unassuming demeanor that convinced longtime crypto professionals of his legitimacy. According to Ernst & Young’s postmortem audit following the exchange’s collapse, Cotten had created fake customer accounts—including one under the name “Chris Markay”—and used non-existent Canadian dollars to purchase genuine cryptocurrencies from legitimate users. He then transferred these stolen digital assets to other exchanges to fund increasingly risky speculative positions.

Most fatefully, Gerald Cotten became heavily long on Ethereum. That turned out to be a catastrophic bet: ETH crashed more than 90% throughout 2018 and remained depressed until late 2020. According to Ontario Securities Commission investigators, Cotten’s losses on stolen customer funds accounted for roughly C$115 million ($93 million USD) of the roughly C$145 million missing from QuadrigaCX’s final accounting. As Aaron Lammer noted during the podcast investigation: “That’s more money than Quadriga made the entire time it was in business. You can’t recover from that.”

When Addiction Becomes the Exit Strategy

The podcast investigation, supported by interviews with journalists who retraced Cotten’s final steps in India, found no credible evidence of forgery, body doubles, or conspiracies. Canadian law enforcement has remained satisfied with the death narrative, refusing to exhume Cotten’s body for DNA verification. Most tellingly, Jennifer Robertson—Gerald Cotten’s wife who accompanied him to the hospital where he died—appears to have received almost none of the remaining stolen funds that had once financed their lavish lifestyle. Even the two dogs mentioned in his will ended up with nothing.

What emerges from this evidence is a portrait not of a calculating mastermind but of someone intoxicated by the high of financial deception. Lammer’s analysis suggests that Gerald Cotten was addicted to the act of stealing itself—that the thrills of fraud provided more satisfaction than any amount of accumulated wealth. Each theft raised the stakes, each risky bet demanded a bigger score. When he began losing catastrophically on Ethereum positions funded by stolen customer money, there was no legitimate recovery possible.

The cruel irony: by the time Cotten stood to benefit most from disappearing, he was likely too compromised financially to actually escape. His death in India—whether hastened by untreated Crohn’s complications or pure bad timing—arrived at the precise moment when his fraud had consumed most of the exchange’s reserves.

The Broader Crypto Reckoning

The Gerald Cotten case rewrites a familiar crypto narrative. Rather than discovering a mastermind who faked his death to enjoy stolen riches, investigators found a lifelong thief whose gambling addiction ultimately destroyed both his victims and himself. Even at current prices—with BTC trading around $68,590 and showing persistent volatility—the Quadriga case serves as a cautionary reminder about the vulnerability of centralized exchanges and the human tendency toward recklessness.

For the cryptocurrency industry, the lesson extends beyond a single founder’s criminal history. It reveals how addiction to risk-taking can destroy more wealth than any premeditated exit scam. And it demonstrates that sometimes the most elaborate mysteries have simpler, more tragic explanations: Gerald Cotten was both a criminal and a victim of his own compulsions, leaving behind not a legendary disappearance but the wreckage of a pathological need for the thrill of theft.