Events continue to unfold in the Quadriga saga. Quadriga is a crypto exchange that was run by a 30-year-old Canadian named Gerald Cotten who allegedly died in India in December. His widow alleges that the exchange was run by Cotten from a single encrypted laptop for which no one has the password. Consequently, about 115,000 customers of the exchange cannot access their funds, totaling more than $140 million, according to an article on NDTV.com.
Here’s the latest:
The law firms appointed by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to represent Quadriga’s customers have a established a committee of users who will help the lawyers represent others who were affected by Quadriga’s shutdown. The seven member committee includes a banker, an engineer and an economic policy adviser.
News outlets are reporting that Quadriga co-founder Michael Patryn was formerly known as Omar Dhanani who had spent time in federal prison in the United States on charges of conspiracy to commit credit-and-bank card fraud in 2005. Dhanani was an operator of shadowcrew.com, a now defunct marketplace for trafficking stolen credit and bank card numbers. Dhanani also admitted guilt in 2007 in California to separate criminal cases for burglary, grand larceny and computer fraud, according to Bloomberg. Patryn was deported to Canada, where he became involved in cryptocurrency and later co-founded Quadriga with Cotten.
Ernst & Young, the court-appointed accounting firm that is examining Quadriga reported its discovery that the cold wallets that Quadriga is known to have used were empty, leaving open the question of what happened to more than a hundred million dollars in funds deposited by Quadriga customers.
Crypto in 2019 apparently means asking questions that we never expected to ask. Such as, how is it possible for funds to disappear from a cold wallet, controlled by a dead man who allegedly left no copy of the private keys? Following on from 21CRYPTOS previous article on Zerononcence s claim that they found $90 million of the QuardigaCX missing funds, now, according to a new report by Ernst Young (EY) who have been appointed as Quadriga monitors by the Canadian courts, this puzzle is simply one of many.