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Downloaded from YTS.MX
[mysterious music playing]
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[distorted voice] I never knew who Gerry was.
My name is Gerald Cotten, and I'm the founder of QuadrigaCX.
[wolf man] And I actually didn't need to know who Gerry was.
When you're conducting business across the Internet,
you're putting your trust in this little kind of veneer of the website.
[computer dings]
It's a bunch of HTML pages cobbled together with string and tape.
Strip the veneer away and you realize how actually fragile that is
and that actually behind that website are real people.
[clicking]
And it's those people that you need to trust.
[mysterious music continues]
[computer chimes]
This is a real mystery that's unfolding this morning,
and it all has to do with the death of Gerald Cotten,
along with the disappearance of $250 million.
Where is this money?
[reporter] About 110,000 customer accounts.
[man 2] This was all my money, my life savings, everything.
[computer chimes]
[reporter 2] It puts this whole Bitcoin world in the crosshairs.
There's some people suggesting that maybe he's not dead.
[woman] Allegedly, Gerry faked his own death and ran off with the money.
He was now in hiding and had had his face modified by a plastic surgeon.
[man laughing]
[man 3] He could be a citizen of 20 countries
under 20 different faces and 20 different names.
Okay, now scan the QR code…
[man 4] He doesn't come off as a sophisticated criminal mastermind.
[whirring]
[chuckles]
[wolf man] There were so many different pieces to the story.
So many questions.
[phone chimes]
[man 5] We need to get to the bottom of this.
[woman 2] It turned into a shit tornado of catastrophic proportions.
[computer chiming]
[man 3] Either I know a guy who screwed up and lost a quarter billion,
or I know a guy who pulled off one of the greatest crimes in history.
[suspenseful music playing]
[mysterious music playing]
[man 6] Bitcoin can change the world.
That's my belief.
I believe that Gerry thought the same thing.
Bitcoin is counterculture.
There's an element of rebellion to it, and in that regard, you could say, uh,
there's a bit of rock and roll going on to Bitcoin.
But a lot of crypto people
either are paranoid or specifically distrust people.
Trust is not common in my industry.
I bet a lot of them did not agree to do this.
[energetic music playing]
[man 3] There's only so much time to, uh, exercise
when you're living the crypto life, so you do what you can.
Me, I'm, u… I'm really, like, a number guy.
I don't do words. I do numbers.
Yeah, I definitely trust technology more than I do people.
That's awesome.
When I first heard about Bitcoin, it was, like, early 2013.
I'd found the local community here.
Uh, we were just meeting in restaurants once a week
and just talking about Bitcoin.
You know, the same eight to 12 people every time.
It was through the Bitcoin co-op and community that I met Gerry Cotten.
Gerald, starting with you.
-Yes. -What's your story?
You were born. Now you're here. What happened in between?
[chuckles]
Gerry came across friendly, positive, upbeat.
He always laughed.
Like, I don't know what Gerry would look like angry.
[man 7] Gerry's stuck in the maze.
[laughs]
Everyone that was part of that scene at the time was definitely very nerdy.
[whirring]
I wouldn't describe any of us as really fitting in anywhere.
[Gerry laughs]
Everyone has a thing they're a nerd about, and they just like that thing.
I think it's all right.
It seems like Gerry's was business.
[Gerry] Bitcoin is a digital currency.
It's basically like you have cash, but it exists only in digital form.
Gerry was an incredibly charming, very smart promoter of the technology.
The Bitcoin community is trying to move away
from the traditional forms of currency and into this modern, digital currency,
which doesn't have the bureaucracy of the banks.
Smart, um, and knew it.
But one of the hardest parts was acquiring the Bitcoin.
Especially in Canada.
So I created QuadrigaCX in 2013
for buying and selling Bitcoin.
[Gerry] So for those who aren't familiar with Bitcoin exchanges and what we do,
I like to compare it to a stock exchange.
However, instead of trading stocks in our exchange, people trade Bitcoin.
[Amber] In its simplest form,
a cryptocurrency exchange is something that would allow you to exchange
between Bitcoin and dollars, dollars and Bitcoin.
[beeps]
And they make money by taking a fee
for each of those trades that they process.
[Alex] The Bitcoin Club had just been going to restaurants
and just trying to find a place to let us sit and talk about Bitcoin.
When the Quadriga office opened, Gerry kind of invited us all in, um,
the whole community, and he said, "You can just come here and hang out."
"This can be the place we talk about Bitcoin."
You know, people had really high hopes Quadriga would help legitimize Bitcoin.
I see it as a pivotal moment in the Bitcoin space.
It's basically a new chapter as we move towards the mainstream financial industry.
[Andrew] We were at the meetup having Bitcoin beers
when, uh, someone said, "Guys, check the Bitcoin price."
It is the hottest currency in the world.
Bitcoin's value has skyrocketed.
The chart looks like the left-hand side of an Eiffel Tower.
And we all took out our phones and started yelling like, "Oh my God!"
"Guys, look. Oh my God! Look at it go."
[reporter 3] Bitcoin's value reached $11,000.
12,000.
[reporter 4] $15,000.
$17,000.
$18,000.
The new currency is making a lot of people rich.
Ten years ago, it didn't even exist.
I have to say I'm feeling a bit of FOMO here.
Bitcoin went from relative obscurity to front page news.
[reporter 5] Bitcoin is becoming mainstream.
Every bar I go into, the bartender wants to talk about Bitcoin.
When Quadriga was founded in 2013, when Bitcoin was only worth $100,
if you fast-forward all the way to near the end of 2017,
we had our, uh, touch of $20,000 Bitcoin.
People would say, "Where should I get Bitcoin?" I would say, "QuadrigaCX."
[narrator] Introducing QuadrigaCX…
If you had an interest in Bitcoin and were in Canada, you'd heard of Quadriga.
When we began, we were a relatively small company,
trading just a few Bitcoins every day.
However, over the past year,
we've grown to become the largest exchange in the country.
[applause]
Every time there's a wave of adoption, it's good and bad.
You get a few new believers
and a whole lot of new people trying to get rich.
Hi, everyone. My name's Tong, and I'm a Chinese Canadian,
and welcome to my YouTube channel.
On my YouTube channel, there's a lot of different types of videos.
[whirring]
[Tong] And I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoy making them.
And, uh, thanks for watching.
I was in San Francisco. You know, I'm a software engineer.
Even though software engineers make good salaries in San Francisco,
after working with virtually no stop for the past, um, seven, eight years,
I wanted to quit. Travel or do something like that.
A lot of my friends made a lot of money on cryptocurrency.
They were making hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time.
Oh my gosh. Look at this thing!
[engine revs]
In 2011, I bought Bitcoin at $2.52.
And so, technically, this Lamborghini only cost me about $115.
[engine revs]
[man 8] Whoo-hoo!
So I was like, "Okay, I gotta get some money too,"
so I just took out three loans.
It was about $85,000 in total.
And I put it all into different cryptocurrencies.
[grunts]
Nobody has the patience to wanna get rich slow.
I wanted to keep up with my friends.
Ah.
Yeah, that's good.
[Gerry] As of now, Canada's approximately one percent of the global trading volume.
So as we expand globally,
we'll be able to grow and our profits will increase dramatically.
[man 9] And let me paint the picture.
Mr. Cotten looks probably exactly what you think an Internet genius would look like.
-A young, attractive man. -[Gerry laughs]
So, yeah, yeah, he's exactly what you picture in your mind.
How many coins did you buy at a time like this?
[Gerry] Oh, like, a hundred.
[man 9] Really?
[Gerry] It was very profitable. And--
[man 9] Are we hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg? Is that what's going on?
[Gerry laughs]
In 2017, they did so well, like, everything's falling in your lap.
Um, probably millions. No, not probably. Definitely tens of millions.
He was buying a plane.
Buying a boat.
A little island, too, apparently.
He started acquiring properties.
And had been recently married.
Here we go.
[Amber] He was not flashy when he was here.
He was a button-down shirt, jeans type of guy.
-Now he was living the high life. -[Gerry] …away!
[uplifting music playing]
Traveling around the world and was living a digital nomad lifestyle.
And just working from wherever he was, which was fantastic.
Bitcoin rose and rose and rose.
And ultimately, it crashed.
And, uh,
I think that was the beginning of troubles at QuadrigaCX.
The Bitcoin roller coaster continues to be on a wild ride tonight.
The cryptocurrency has gone from hitting a new record price yesterday
to nose-diving today.
The market started crashing.
Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies started to drop down.
Bitcoin took a serious tumble.
[reporter 6] It's now down almost 50%.
[reporter 7] 60%.
By December 2018, by the end of the year,
I think Bitcoin was around $4,000 US.
People who thought they were wealthy will suddenly become bankrupt overnight.
[reporter 8] In just 24 hours,
more than $60 billion was wiped off the value
of the entire cryptocurrency market.
[man 10] What's causing this crash?
Usually, it isn't really easy to tell. There are different factors.
But for once, this time, it's very clear what it was.
China and South Korea wants to ban Bitcoin trading.
And that was enough to really drive down the price of these cryptocurrencies.
[Tong] I had a lot of debt because I took out $85,000 in loans.
I was down maybe 70, 80% on that.
The interest was really high on these loans,
and I was paying my mortgage.
It was a very stressful situation.
My relationships with everyone, everything was souring because of it.
The only thing I could think of at the time was to sell my apartment
to get out of that debt.
Of course, I had to pay off the personal loans I took out
and then the mini-mortgage.
After all that, I had about $400,000.
I decided to move this $400,000 back to Canada.
You don't wanna use the bank, because the bank will take 2% commission.
So 2% commission on $400,000 you can already guess is a lot of money.
I thought maybe I can use crypto to do it.
I noticed that Quadriga had a 10% premium on there when-- when selling your Bitcoin.
You can actually make some money transferring to Quadriga.
So that's what I did.
[narrator] You'll never have trouble moving funds
into and out of your QuadrigaCX account.
[Tong] So I transferred $400,000 worth of Bitcoin over to Quadriga.
And I immediately sold it.
I immediately tried to transfer it out.
I bought in US dollars, but after selling in Quadriga, it becomes Canadian dollars.
So I had a $500,000 Canadian withdrawal.
And I remember it taking a long time.
Kept waiting and nothing happened.
I started to get worried a little bit.
This was all my money, my life savings, everything, in this one exchange,
and
I was praying every day,
hoping I would get my money soon.
[woman 3] I always wanted to be an investigative reporter,
sort of focused on business specifically.
It definitely feels like you're a little bit of a detective.
In the fall, 2018, I started getting tons and tons of emails
from just random Quadriga users saying,
"I can't get my money out," which seemed a bit strange.
During the sort of boom,
millions and millions of dollars from hundreds of users
started flooding in to Quadriga.
According to some data that we got,
$1.2 billion was transacted through Quadriga that year,
and Quadriga was making money off of all of these transactions.
I reached out to Quadriga. I emailed Gerry, and I said,
"Hey, you know, I'm reporting a story for The Globe and Mail."
"Users are saying they can't get money out of the exchange."
And "Can you tell me what's going on?"
[computer beeps]
He told me the reason that we can't process all these withdrawal requests
is that the bank has literally frozen our money,
because they don't trust cryptocurrency exchanges.
He said, "We have $26 million sitting in these bank accounts,
so really it's the bank's fault people can't get their money out."
It seemed like a plausible enough explanation, and he was very charming.
He said, "Can you tell me who these people who are having issues getting money out
because I'd love to clear it up with them."
He seemed like a very nice guy.
[Tong] I started my withdrawal request around late October.
I waited. November 2018.
Still nothing.
By the end of December, I still haven't received anything.
I emailed the support. They kept saying the same thing.
"Gonna take one more week, two more weeks."
"We'll get this resolved and figure it out."
Of course, I was getting more and more frustrated.
This went on into 2019.
I started to panic.
This was my-- my entire savings built through, you know, ten years of work
and selling my apartment.
And I just prayed to God.
[Amber] Around that time, Gerry was traveling a lot,
so I would message him, and I would get back,
"Hey, I'm in Costa Rica," or "I'm in Iceland."
But those were always followed
with a "don't mention to anyone where I am," um,
which was strange.
Maybe that wasn't just his working from wherever he wanted to be.
Maybe that was him avoiding something or someone.
I had no idea what was about to unfold.
[Tong] Kept waiting and nothing happened.
It was like this until January 14th.
I remember the exact date,
because January 14th is when everything kind of blew up.
[reporter 9] Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange is in hot water.
Scott is here to help us unravel what we know so far.
-Scott. -Yeah.
This is a real mystery that's unfolding this morning,
and it all has to do with the death of the CEO.
Here he is here, Gerald Cotten. He's the founder of QuadrigaCX.
[reporter 10] The wife of Gerry Cotten, Jennifer Robertson, said he died suddenly
while in India at the age of just 30.
[Alexandra] I was sort of shocked. I thought, "What was he doing in India?"
[Tong] Oh, man.
I felt
very nervous.
-And this is an evolving story. -Well, keep an eye on that for us if you--
[Alex] It just was, like, a real shocker. Um…
He must have been doing great with the Bitcoin and his business.
And then just one day he was gone. Um…
Um, just… You always expect you're gonna see someone again that you know,
and just one day you find out you won't.
[Amber] I was shocked.
And I was-- I was really taken aback.
I was very sad.
And he was so young.
[Alexandra] My editor said, you know, "Keep an eye on it."
And then shortly after,
the exchange suddenly stopped working.
[computer chimes]
And then Quadriga posted a notice saying that no one knew
how to access the cryptocurrency.
And that's when I kind of realized that Gerry was the only guy
who knew all the passwords into the cryptocurrency.
At that point, the story just goes nuts.
This is an astonishing story.
Gerald Cotten passed away, and he took the passwords with him.
And that means $190 million of customers' holdings are locked inside,
and no one can access them.
And I think it was at that point, I was like, "Oh. Oh, crap." [chuckles]
I felt like I was having a heart attack.
-[heavy breathing] -[heart beating]
[Tong] It felt like there was this pressure on my chest.
I-- I wanted, just like everyone else, to get our money.
It didn't seem real that this was happening to me. Um…
Right. This-- It can't be, 'cause…
[Andrew] People question every story.
People are suspicious,
especially when money is involved.
Especially when their money is involved.
[Alexandra] Usually if you're running a cryptocurrency company or an exchange,
you have safeguards in place, right?
So that if you do die or something happens to you,
someone, you know, knows how to access it.
It's like, it just didn't make sense.
My initial reaction is, "Bullshit."
"This is bullshit."
I'm an AI consultant.
I quit my day job, was going to start my own company.
I decided to use Quadriga to try to make money till my company takes off.
I put around $70,000 in there.
And then, um, Quadriga did not honor the withdrawal.
[phone chimes]
And that's when I saw the statement
from Jennifer Robertson, wife and partner of Gerald Cotten.
"Gerry died due to complications of Crohn's disease
on December 9, 2018, while traveling in India
where he was opening an orphanage for children in need."
"Sincerely, Jennifer Robertson, Estate Executor of Gerald Cotten."
The India, the orphanage. I'm like, "Gimme a break."
Gerry died on December 9th.
The date they announced it, January 14th.
To come out and make a statement
a month after his death…
sounds wrong.
This is not right. Something is off.
Hey, guys. How's it going?
Um, so I just wanna give an update, um, about my situation right now.
Like, who could have predicted that a CEO would die mysteriously
under mysterious circumstances in India?
You know, he was the only one that had the keys to the wallet,
but who can you really believe?
It's-- it's a really depressing and shocking thing to happen.
The next steps is to, um…
[sighs]
Of course I was angry.
I wanted to find out
if there was an active community I could chat with about this.
So I looked on Telegram,
because Telegram is actually what I used for a lot of crypto groups.
Tried to search for Quadriga.
So there was this main Quadriga Telegram group,
QuadrigaUncovered, that had a lot of other affected users on it.
[computer dings]
[computer chiming]
[computer dings]
[computer chiming]
[Tong] A lot of people just wanted answers.
What happened to our money?
What happened to Gerry Cotten?
No one was out there to help us. We were on our own, basically.
It was chaos, right? It was like a bunch of people.
Some are, like me, looking for their money.
[computer chimes]
Some just trolling.
[computer chimes]
[computer dings]
[Ali] But there's also a person named QCXINT.
He sort of brought in this spirit of investigation.
He's the old, wise man on top of the hill that we go to.
I'm not sure what I can reveal about his investigation or not.
'Cause I'm just always, like, worried
that he's gonna yell at me for saying too much.
[QCXINT] One of the things that you often have to practice
when you get into crypto is good "op sec."
Short for "operational security."
Crypto is fairly unregulated.
You have to be extremely, extremely careful
when you're dealing with large sums.
Some individuals, they have actually been attacked and then tortured
to give up their keys and things like that.
And that's part of the reason why
I like to remain anonymous.
I'd been trading on Quadriga
in kind of dribs and drabs in 2018,
but unfortunately, over time, it kind of accumulated to the point
where I probably had more funds in the exchange
than I was strictly comfortable with.
Um, you know, so, at the end of the day, when Quadriga went down,
that was a significant sum.
That was, you know, north of six figures, top sum.
So I guess being personally involved with this story,
I was highly incentivized to find out what had happened.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] There's this explosion of interest into the circumstances
of Gerry's death in India.
[Tong] We just started investigating what might have happened.
[computer dings]
[QCXINT] Everything is turned over. Everything is looked at.
And we were all looking at his Instagram account.
Looking at his wife Jennifer's Instagram account.
Looking at their travel photos.
Looking for any little tidbit of information.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] So we start looking into Crohn's disease
and whether or not this was actually something that you could die from.
[Ali] I sort of started Googling it.
From what I gathered, it's a form of stomach sickness.
You get diarrhea.
Certain food could trigger it more than other food.
[Tong] People don't die from Crohn's disease,
-especially at a young age. -[computer chiming]
[Ali] Then the death certificate starts circulating around.
[QCXINT] It was originally sourced by reporters.
And it had misspelled his last name.
C-O-T-T-A-N instead of C-O-T-T-E-N.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] What is interesting is that there is a market
for kind of fake death certificates.
Such things do exist.
[computer chimes]
[QCXINT] And then I spoke to someone that knew Gerry personally.
He shared some info with me.
He sent me a screenshot of Gerry's Skype profile,
and it showed that Gerry's Skype cam was active after his death.
What the fuck?
I guess you could call it red flags.
To me, this looks like
Gerry was still alive.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] I think myself, like a lot of other people,
immediately thought that this might be an exit scam
and that he hadn't died,
that he had almost definitely faked his own death
and that he'd actually run off with the crypto
and was kind of hiding on an island somewhere.
[computer chimes]
[man 10] I'm not convinced he's dead.
What do you guys think? Do you think he is dead?
My spider senses, not, no, nope. Mm-mm. Mm-mm.
This guy is not dead.
[computer chimes]
[man 11] He faked it.
[computer chiming]
I started working on this story
with another Globe And Mail reporter named Joe Castaldo.
If somebody fakes their own death,
that is just an amazing story.
And there's precedent for it too.
Now to the strange case of hedge fund swindler Samuel Israel.
Last week, it appeared he might have killed himself
rather than serve a long stretch in prison.
But tonight, federal authorities think he staged the whole thing.
This US hedge fund manager, he left his car on a bridge,
and I think wrote in the dust on his hood or something like "suicide is painless"
to make it look like he jumped.
But in fact, he turned himself in a month later.
I was thinking of that story when this happened with Gerry.
Well, it's happened before. It could happen again.
[QCXINT] It seemed like something out of a movie script,
but you know, you have to ask yourself,
"Is Gerry capable of pulling off an exit scam?"
I guess when I think of somebody who's a criminal mastermind,
who's devious, calculating, cunning…
what we don't think of is a slightly geeky 24-year-old.
[Gerry chuckles]
[Gerry] Charizard has chosen to use Bursting Inferno.
[QCXINT] Burning Pokemon cards.
[Gerry] Go!
[QCXINT] And, um, melting money in a microwave.
[Gerry] We'll put it in there for a minute.
It looks like it's melting.
[QCXINT] Looking at some of this material,
you don't think, "Well, this is a criminal mastermind."
He would've needed help.
Husbands and wives tend to tell each other nearly everything.
Oh, can I talk about Jen now? [laughs]
His wife, Jennifer Robertson, was the only other person with him
when he supposedly died.
[QCXINT] Being the person seemingly in control of the exchange at that point…
[Ali] Naturally, the group starts looking into her.
Who is she? Is she even real, right?
[Joe] People who knew him didn't even really know about Jennifer,
that they were together.
And I found that just a little strange.
I did not know he had a wife, um, or how long they were together.
I'm not sure if he was, uh, dating her back when he was in Vancouver
or if he had met her after the fact.
Okay, where am I supposed to sit?
I don't-- I can't have those.
[interviewer] If someone had said to you, "Gerry's a criminal mastermind."
"This is the kind of guy he is." What would you say to them?
I would have told them to fuck off.
Drop dead. Just get away from me.
Like, I just can't… I can't…
It enrages me.
I really just want to be an advocate for my sister,
because none of us have said anything. Her lawyers kept saying not to.
Jenny had nobody, and I just have a lot that I wanna say.
She's beautiful. She's funny.
She's always happy.
Um, well, was.
The last time that I saw Gerry, he was calm, cool, collected.
Uh, I would say I've got great intuition about people's moods.
He loved Jenny.
He wasn't trying to be the guy on a beach faking his death.
Doesn't make sense.
She met Gerry on Tinder,
and he happened to be the very first person that she swiped right on.
That was, you know, just before Christmas, 2014.
At first, she didn't think that he was her type.
He was kind of introverted, and, uh, we're kind of loud.
But my whole family truly loved Gerry.
You know, once he got used to us, he was funny
and-- and he made jokes and he was lively.
She was over the moon.
He seemed to be so romantic and very thoughtful.
But he really was kind of the Prince Charming.
They were meant to be together.
They truly were, you know, soul mates.
All of it just kind of clicked for them.
It was just really the way he looked at her all the time.
He loved her. You could feel it.
And one of the things that he had said to her was
that she had taught him how to love,
that he didn't even know that those feelings were possible.
I'd never heard of Reddit.
But I'd heard about it from Jenny,
'cause, of course, it was really upsetting her.
Jenny would read everything.
'Cause, in her grief, she was trying to hold on to Gerry,
she read anything and everything about him.
At first, there was a lot of nice stuff,
but then it became a little dark.
And getting darker and darker.
[computer chimes]
[Tong] There was a Reddit post that caught everyone's attention.
[QCXINT] It's purportedly from a contractor called QCXContractor.
And he's doing an AMA on Reddit.
Now, an AMA is short for "ask me anything."
So, for the first time, we've actually got someone inside Quadriga
and is doing a little bit of an anonymous leak.
You know, one of the things they said was that they were at the funeral.
[Ali] I started asking questions about the funeral.
Whether the casket was open or not.
[computer dings]
Again, um, not sure whether there was an actual dead body in there or not.
No, I did not see the body.
[interviewer] Um…
-Did Jen see the body? -Yes.
[computer dings]
[Ali] The contractor said she was "fake grieving."
[computer dings]
Very, very strange behavior for a widow who just lost her husband.
[computer dinging]
[Alex] It didn't seem like she had much to be happy for then.
But she's dancing at her husband's funeral.
Seems weird. Seems like something's up.
[Ali] It just didn't look like he really died.
[QCXINT] I reached out to this QCXContractor on Telegram.
[computer chimes]
Then I was able to confirm that they were in fact a Quadriga employee.
What he told me was that there'd been some kind of confrontation
between Jennifer and Gerry's parents.
It was difficult to have them there.
We're East Coast. Got a lot of Celtic heritage.
We had an Irish wake.
There was a lot of food. There was a lot of alcohol,
and, unfortunately, Gerry's parents didn't like that.
[QCXINT] It basically led to them being thrown out of the house after the funeral,
where I believe Gerry's parents were meant to be staying the night.
Something major has gone down,
to the point where she's told them to get out
and that she doesn't need them anymore.
[computer chiming]
[Alexandra] There was all of this speculation around
whether she was, like, in on it.
We wanted to see what we could learn about her involvement in Quadriga.
The story that Gerry was the only one
who knew how to access Quadriga's crypto funds came from Jen.
Following Gerry's death,
she scoured their apartment looking for passwords to get into his laptop.
She couldn't find it anywhere.
[thunder rumbles]
After Gerry's death,
Quadriga filed for creditor protection.
Creditor protection is granted to companies
when they run into financial trouble.
Included in the court filings was an affidavit from Jennifer Robertson.
Jennifer goes on to basically say she didn't really know anything
about how the company operated
and that Gerry had been running this company entirely on his own.
[Tong] I was a little bit in disbelief.
I mean, during all of their travels together,
he never once told her anything about how Quadriga was operated?
Like, that didn't make sense to me.
[Alexandra] Then we discovered these Quadriga users
who had bank transfers
that had come to them through this property management company
that she was running.
This would directly contradict Jennifer's statement
on her affidavit saying that she wasn't involved with QuadrigaCX in any way.
If she lied in her affidavit, she could've lied about any other things.
[Joe] I saw that, and I was wondering, "Well, what's going on here?"
I asked her lawyer about it, who just didn't comment.
And, uh, I don't think we ever got an official answer to that question.
I'm sure that the lawyer said,
"We don't need to say anything about that."
I don't know.
Right? So were some things omitted?
Yeah. On purpose? I don't know.
Oversight? Could been. My sister's not a liar.
I-- I started to believe that Jennifer Robertson was kind of in on this.
Are they just playing the long game?
She's playing the part of the gullible wife.
She knows that there's gonna be heat for the next three years,
and then, at some point, she's gonna nick off
and, you know, meet him in an island in the Caribbean somewhere.
We've got a lot of what's kind of circumstantial evidence
that this could be an exit scam.
Problem is we kind of don't have a way
to indisputably prove that just yet.
[computer chiming]
[woman 4] So the news first broke in February of 2019.
And I was like, "I'm sorry. What?"
Like, the founder died and then he was the only one that had access to the keys?
Like, what?
I immediately was questioning everything about the story.
I'd suspected that the money might be moving,
which would make their entire sort of point moot, right?
'Cause their whole claim was that he died and he was the only one with the keys.
Um, but if money had moved after his death, then that would be a lie.
The whole purpose of Bitcoin is, like, everything's verifiable by everyone.
Bitcoin is backed by underlying technology called the blockchain.
There are websites that have sort of visualizations of the blockchain.
But the simplest way to think about it is like a digital ledger.
Like a spreadsheet.
Every single computer is able to see the transactions
to verify that the transactions are valid
and then to verify, like, the whole history of transactions.
And you can just follow the money wherever it goes.
What an exchange will do is have 5% or 10% of all of the money
that they're holding in a hot wallet, and the rest is cold.
And a cold wallet is an offline wallet.
The hot wallet is like your checkbook or your debit card.
And the cold wallet is, like, the vault.
I knew a couple of Quadriga's cold wallet addresses on the blockchain.
And so I started there.
I spent the next couple of weeks parsing a huge number of transactions.
I was expecting either see a balance of, like, $100 million or something,
or to very quickly see a transfer of 10 million, 100 million.
Some big sum of money.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Taylor] However, with the Quadriga addresses,
I didn't ever find this pile of money.
If you don't see the money leave or go anywhere,
the question is just like, "Well, where did the money go?"
The money's just…
I don't know.
[computer chimes]
Once I determined that there was no money in the cold storage,
that's when I stopped believing that he was dead.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] Finding out that this whole story
about the keys to the cold wallet
being essentially a bit of a wild goose chase is sickening.
[Kimberly] We were scared that Jenny would be implicated in it.
Because of the amount of money,
my brother and I were starting to worry that she might have to go to jail.
Right? Like, we aren't people that go to jail.
We're not criminals. You know, we kind of know somebody
who knows somebody who might have did something kind of sort of bad,
but that was the-- the worry.
We were afraid for her.
[QCXINT] It's certainly starting to look like fraud or embezzlement.
[computer chiming]
But, you know, the-- the hopes of finding a five-foot something,
slightly ginger-toned Caucasian Gerry seemed to be very slim.
We-- we knew he was mischievous. We knew that.
This video confirms that a walnut can indeed be lit on fire.
[laughing]
[Andrew] I bet you he's good at laying low, at being quiet.
I think these are all things Gerry is good at.
[Alex] He could be a citizen of 20 countries
under 20 different faces and 20 different names.
[Alexandra] And then this sort of rumor started circulating online
that the money had been moved to Bermuda.
And that there was this plastic surgeon there who had operated on Gerry
to change his face so that he could continue to live
without being recognizable.
I called the RCMP, which is equivalent of FBI for Canada.
[phone ringing]
[Ali] And I said, "Look, there's this guy who I think is alive,
leaving the country with millions of dollars of our money,
and I need you guys to sort of investigate,"
and she said, "Well, if they leave, they leave. That's fine."
"We can try to catch 'em later."
Right? Casually. Right? It was borderline insulting.
[computer chiming]
Okay.
The Ontario Securities Commission, also known as the OSC,
is responsible for regulating financial markets
in the Canadian province of Ontario.
Our mandate was to find out where the money went.
And therefore the enforcement branch of the OSC decided
to open an investigation.
In the first two years of operations,
Quadriga had accountants, lawyers on staff,
and therefore there are some records for that time period.
However, after 2016, there's a general absence of records
that you would normally expect to see in a business.
If you do not have access to records, it simply complicates your work.
However, working as a forensic accountant, I expect my work to be complicated.
We came across something that caused us great concern.
Throughout the life of Quadriga,
large volumes of crypto assets were being sent
to other crypto asset exchanges located abroad.
[Taylor] What the fuck is going on?
That's not normal, uh, at all.
Why would an exchange be sending directly to another exchange?
The answer's not usually a good one.
They had to be, like, trying to hide something.
Maybe, like, trying to launder money?
[police radio chatter]
[QCXINT] In the world of money laundering,
there can be some quite bad people involved.
Organized crime, Russian mobsters, you know, you name it.
So,
did Gerry find himself in something that was too deep?
Like, if you're laundering money for the mob, you're scared of the mob.
You're not scared of the cops.
[QCXINT] If we were to uncover where the money had gone,
we would have to dig very deep
and look into every aspect of the exchange.
Certainly, the conventional narrative was that Gerry was the founder of Quadriga
and the CEO and that he was in control.
Um, but one of the interesting things I found
was the original QuadrigaCX domain name…
had actually been registered not by Gerry.
Uh, it'd been registered by someone else.
This individual known as Michael Patryn.
He definitely was an important individual in the founding origins of Quadriga.
So I started to dig around and look into him a little bit more.
[reporter 11] Meanwhile, law enforcement officials in both Canada,
where QuadrigaCX is located, and in the United States,
are investigating potential wrongdoing…
[interviewer] Are you comfortable talking about him, Andrew?
What would you like to know?
When we first met Mike and Gerry,
it was Mike that presented himself as the founder of QuadrigaCX.
And Gerry kind of tagged along.
[man 12] Our guest tonight is Michael Patryn from, uh, Quadriga.
Why don't you tell us a bit about yourself?
Sure. I've been working with digital currency since about 2003.
I've operated numerous exchanges, emerging platforms, casinos,
provided advisory services
with respect to growth and development of other such companies.
It did always seem as though Mike was in charge.
Mike was muscular and an amateur UFC guy.
First time I met Gerry was in Mike's fancy car.
And Mike was doing all the talking.
Gerry would laugh at his jokes when they weren't funny.
That's-- That's key.
And that was kind of what really immediately made me see them
in a power imbalance in their relationship.
There were definitely a lot of rumors about Mike going around.
I think that Gerry, he should be afraid of Mike.
[chuckles] I would be.
[Joe] People who knew Patryn were reluctant to talk about him.
They were afraid of him.
[Alexandra] There were all these posts on the Internet, mostly on Reddit,
connecting him with this other guy named Omar Dhanani.
So these posts were essentially alleging
that Michael Patryn was hiding this criminal past,
that he had once lived in California under the name Omar Dhanani
and that he had been involved in a money laundering service
for an identity theft ring called Shadowcrew,
an online marketplace for trafficking in stolen identities
and stolen credit card information.
[QCXINT] This is a bit of a bombshell,
but, you know, a few forum posts don't necessarily prove a point.
[Alexandra] We needed proof.
[Joe] We figure, "Okay, we can get the mug shots for Omar Dhanani
and see if it's the same person."
About a week later, they arrived in my email.
I remember sitting with Alex and an editor in The Globe office,
and the editor is studying these photos of Dhanani…
and Patryn.
It's going, like, back and forth closely.
And he notices a pockmark
on Dhanani's forehead…
and how Michael Patryn has a pockmark in the exact same spot.
Michael Patryn is definitely Omar Dhanani.
[Ali] If I would've known that, I would've never, ever put my money in Quadriga.
[Tong] This is crazy.
I just thought, "Well, this is another thread in the rabbit hole."
"How deep can it go?"
[QCXINT] When you find one of the founders has this criminal past,
that person becomes suspect number one.
[Daniel] In February 2019, when Quadriga ceased operating,
it owed its users cash and cryptocurrencies
at a combined value of $215 million.
However, we were only able to identify
approximately $46 million worth of assets,
leaving an unexplained shortfall of approximately $169 million.
And that didn't make sense…
It is the hottest currency in the world.
[Daniel] …because in 2017, when the market was booming,
more and more individuals, more users, were onboarding the platform
and bringing in more cryptocurrencies and also more cash.
We were concerned that crypto assets were being stolen.
We knew that there was a co-founder to Quadriga.
His name was Michael Patryn.
And therefore, we were interested in talking to him.
We were unable to make contact with Mr. Patryn.
A lot of people thought that Mike Patryn actually took some of their money
and ran off with it, or maybe he was in cahoots with Gerry.
Maybe they conspired together.
[computer chiming]
[Ali] As the story sort of was lacking entertainment,
Michael Patryn joins the Telegram group.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] Creditors are pretty angry, and they're looking for answers.
[computer chiming]
[Joe] So we emailed Patryn.
[Alexandra] And he told us that he had not had any level of involvement in Quadriga
since he split with the company.
He told us he left the company in 2016.
I don't know if we fully believed Patryn.
[computer chiming]
[QCXINT] Patryn seems like a fairly seasoned character.
He was deft in deflecting a lot of the criticism that was aimed at him,
maintaining that he was a legitimate businessman,
but whether or not, you know, he's entirely innocent is another question.
[computer chiming]
I'm like, "Wow, he thinks Gerry's alive."
[computer chiming]
[Joe] Outwardly, Gerry and Patryn seemed very different.
[whirring]
Gerry was this smiley, kind of nerdy guy.
Whereas, you know, you look at Patryn online,
and he's fashioning himself as a-- as a macho badass
who has a criminal history.
So what are these two guys doing together?
[QCXINT] Patryn had more of a digital footprint online.
And that trail led me to this site called TalkGold.
TalkGold was principally a forum, you know, for investment scams.
It was a real den of thieves, TalkGold.
People trying to run scams and dodge other people's scams.
Digging around in the archives, you know, I come across lots of Patryn's posts.
And one of the things that I noticed on there
is that he's got this buddy called Sceptre.
And Sceptre's also very active on TalkGold.
[Joe] Sceptre set up and ran
at least two of these online scams through TalkGold.
You know, a lot of people lost substantial sums of money.
[Alexandra] Sceptre had this scam called S&S Investments.
S&S Investments provided very little actual information about itself,
and, you know, it promised a massive return.
And then, for a little while,
they would sort of start paying people back.
Until one day, the entire program just kind of disappears
with everybody's money.
Classic exit scam.
Whoever this Sceptre is, it seemed significant.
But I just had this hunch that it was Gerry.
[Joe] I think it was probably around that time I started to talk to QCXINT.
We started to trade information back and forth, essentially.
I combed through, like, every post Sceptre had made,
looking for any sign of him.
Like, slipping up and revealing some personal information.
No success with that.
It was very frustrating, 'cause it-- it kind of became this, like, personal quest
to find out who Sceptre was.
[QCXINT] I kept just following the data trail.
There was a critical piece of evidence that emerged.
It was this public site called Black Hat World.
A white-hat hacker is a good hacker, an ethical hacker.
A black-hat hacker is a bad type.
They're the ones that'll do the dirty work.
One of the things I noticed, there's a user on Black Hat World called Sceptre
that changes their name, that changes their handle to Murdoch1337.
[Joe] And so I decided,
okay, I'm gonna start messaging people
on Black Hat World who interacted with this account
to see what email address this account was using.
And so a few days later this person emailed back…
and included some screenshots.
I opened it up.
My heart is beating really fast. I feel like, "Oh, I'm so close."
One of those screenshots
was the order form that this account filled out.
It had his full name in there.
Gerry Cotten.
Gerry was Sceptre. That was a direct link.
And we're like, "Yes! We got him."
It threw the whole thing into a darker, more sinister context.
Gerald, starting with you.
-Yes. -What's your story?
You were born. Now you're here. What happened in between?
[chuckles]
[QCXINT] Not only had one founder of the exchange had a shady past,
it was actually both founders.
Kind of removes that veil of Gerry,
boy next door, kind of likable nerd.
What you actually start to see is something a lot more sinister.
This Sceptre character, this other, you know, darker Gerry…
[laughing]
[QCXINT] …has been operating scams…
since he was 14 or 15.
[Joe] What it showed is that Gerry was a serial scammer.
[QCXINT] Sceptre posts about hiring a programmer
to build a cryptocurrency exchange.
And less than three months or so later,
Quadriga was born.
[clears throat]
Quadriga had been architected
from the very beginning, uh, to be a scam of sorts.
[Alexandra] Revealing all of these other things that he had done
gave people this feeling, like he's scammed us yet again
and maybe he actually is still alive somewhere.
My name is Gerald Cotten, and I'm the founder of QuadrigaCX.
It did make me question that maybe he had intentions of, you know,
starting this business and running away with the funds like he had in the past.
[computer chiming]
[Ali] He's literally insulting you and stealing from you in daylight,
and then he's walking away.
[computer chiming]
If Gerry was alive, then there was a chance they could get their money back.
That's ultimately why The Globe decided to send Nathan Vanderklippe to India.
[suspenseful music playing]
[man 13] As a journalist, when you get assigned a story,
one of the first questions that goes through your mind is,
"Are you gonna be able to deliver anything?"
And the idea of going to try to make some sense
of whether someone had actually died in India,
it just seemed, frankly, practically impossible.
I got to India, and from there, it was just a question of going out
and trying to make sense of what was real and what wasn't,
and it felt to me like
the most obvious place to start was at the hospital.
I had found out the name of the doctor, and so I went to his office.
He held up a prescription pad and asked what he could get for me,
and I said, "No, no, no, I'm not-- I'm not looking for medicine."
"I'm looking for some information about this Canadian who had died in Jaipur."
He knew exactly what I was talking about. He remembered this all quite clearly.
And he talked me through what had happened.
So this is what I wrote about it.
"Mr. Cotten and Ms. Robertson arrived at 9:45 p.m."
He was, quote, "admitted with symptoms of acute gastroenteritis."
"Mr. Cotten had vomited ten times,
reported 15 episodes of watery stools, was feverish,
and had a background of Crohn's disease."
"Still, the initial diagnosis pointed to little more than traveler's diarrhea."
"Mr. Cotten spent the night in a private room
where Ms. Robertson also stayed."
"Sometime around noon the next day, his condition took a sharp turn."
"'He became fulminant,' Dr. Sharma said."
"A medical term describing a rapid and severe deterioration."
"At 2:45 p.m., Mr. Cotten went into cardiac arrest."
[machines beeping]
"He was resuscitated, but his blood pressure was low,
and he was placed on a ventilator."
"He went into cardiac arrest again."
"And was resuscitated once more."
"But the third time,
he could not be revived."
"At 7:26 p.m., Mr. Cotten was declared dead."
That all sort of points in the direction
of this having been a death and perhaps a death of natural causes.
I showed Dr. Sharma a couple pictures on my phone of Gerry
and said, "Is this the guy?" And Dr. Sharma said, "That's the guy."
[Kimberly] It was Jenny who really wanted to go to India. Gerry did not.
Unfortunately for Jenny,
even to this day, she feels really guilty about that.
She was devastated.
Because she's so lovely and loving and generous and kind and happy,
she was really broken. I was really afraid for her.
[Alexandra] To me, this idea that Gerry was still alive
was laid to rest when Nathan went to India.
I was like, "Okay, he's dead."
After that, I didn't entertain the idea.
[computer chiming]
Everyone is sort of shocked, confused at the time.
That's where we were at, at that point.
We just had no ground to sort of walk on. We didn't know where we were at.
[QCXINT] I think it was another blow at that point.
[Ali] Gerry's dead. The money's still missing.
We don't exactly know where it went.
[QCXINT] When you're in this situation, you're kind of endlessly optimistic.
There's surely another way that we can get the money back.
We kind of still had more questions, because maybe it wasn't enough.
[interviewer] Did your article end the speculation
about what had happened to Gerry in India?
No, I don't think it ended the speculation.
You know, there's still plenty of people I think who have questions about it.
"Two months later, his rapid death still troubles Dr. Sharma."
"Asked if he was certain about what happened, he said, 'Not at all.'"
"His conclusion was based on one of the best guesses
of what took a 30-year-old man from a luxury hotel
to his deathbed in little more than 24 hours."
"No autopsy was done on Mr. Cotten."
You know, in terms of some of the broader questions about was there foul play here?
Those, it feels to me, are questions that could only be answered with an autopsy.
Why was there no autopsy happening?
It's interesting, right?
Was this a natural cause,
or was Jennifer trying to cover the story up?
[Alexandra] There was a lot of suspicion around Gerry's death from the get-go,
right?
And the will deals with what should happen in the event of Gerry's death.
So, of course, we wanted to get the will to kind of see what was in there.
[Joe] I just emailed the court in Nova Scotia,
and it's public information, so they sent it to me in an email.
It's clear he's a wealthy guy.
The strange thing about the will was that, wow,
he signed this, like, two weeks before he mysteriously died in India.
That's odd.
[computer chimes]
He left all his assets and all his money to Jennifer…
which is very, very suspicious.
[QCXINT] Suspicion really does begin to fall more on Jennifer.
Here she is standing to inherit the substantial property portfolio
and assets worth millions and millions of dollars.
[computer chiming]
[Tong] It is possible that Jennifer could have poisoned Gerry.
Then she could have just said it was his Crohn's disease.
She could potentially have all the keys and access to our money.
[QCXINT] With a little bit of digging,
it becomes apparent that she changed her name a number of times.
[computer chimes]
She changed her name
three times in the span of two to three years.
[computer chimes]
[Tong] I think first and last name was Griffith.
And then it was Forgeron.
And then it was Robertson.
That's a lot of name changes.
Not a normal amount of name changes for an ordinary person.
Then someone pointed out that there was a Michael Forgeron that was murdered
in a case that has not been resolved yet.
[QCXINT] There's some speculation for this to have been, in fact, her ex-husband.
If so, would this make it the second dead husband that's died
in somewhat suspicious circumstances?
[mysterious music playing]
[computer chiming]
[Alexandra] The Telegram group had spiraled out of control.
[computer chiming]
[Alexandra] Jen had death threats made against her.
[computer chiming]
[Alexandra] I felt really bad for her.
She's mourning his death, trying to sort out this mess of a company,
and meanwhile, everyone's suggesting that Jen had actually murdered Gerry.
And there's absolutely no evidence that anything like that had happened.
It was just a bunch of really angry, misogynistic people.
Jenny did not murder Gerry.
[scoffs]
Her first husband, his name was not Michael,
and he's very much alive and well.
The crazier the story, the more somebody thought it was true.
Griffith, that's her father's surname. And then she was married.
And when her divorce was coming up,
she said, "You know, I really never liked 'Griffith.'"
So she did a legal change of name to be Jennifer Robertson.
It just seemed like they had this young woman
that they just wanted to burn at the stake.
She's a witch. Burn the witch.
And it was so unfair. It still is.
The situation got so out of hand that she needed to be put in a safe house.
She was in an apartment undisclosed, somewhere downtown Halifax.
Even my brother and I, we did not know where she was.
But it was that serious.
It was that
she also was that afraid.
What we really needed was immediate, accessible proof
that showed that Jen did not have all the money.
[Daniel] There were several times where I was looking at the data,
wishing that I could have spoken with Mr. Cotten
so that he could have told me what happened.
You work so hard at finding what happened in a case of a fraud.
And suddenly, you've found the one element that cracks open your case.
We came across a series of fake accounts.
One of them was called
"Sceptre Gerry."
And what Cotten did was credit these accounts with fake assets.
Hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies.
And what he started to do was trading against unsuspecting users.
Let's say a user is coming in, and they want to buy a crypto.
Their account gets credited with one crypto.
Unbeknownst to them, that crypto does not exist.
It was Cotten responding to that order,
crediting their account with fake cryptocurrencies.
And that's what he did hundreds of thousands of times.
That's when we were able to identify the link
as to why they were moving assets to other exchanges located abroad.
Cotten was trying to get rich.
He's transferring the cryptocurrencies that are owned by users
and sent them to other platforms for trading.
It looks like Gerry, in a way, treated Quadriga as his own piggybank,
that he could sort of dip into the exchange and take money out.
In effect, Cotten was playing the casino with users' assets.
But he found himself losing instead of winning.
[QCXINT] Gerry, I mean, he was a spectacularly bad trader.
You know, in amongst these kind of periods where crypto is booming
and people are making ten times
or a hundred times their, you know, their investment,
Gerry's managed to do the reverse.
Mr. Cotten lost approximately $150 million by essentially gambling.
[computer chiming]
Oh my God.
I was already on antidepressants, so thank God for that, but…
how could someone lose so much money?
Now, this is when it turned into more of a Ponzi scheme.
In a Ponzi scheme, if the individuals want their money back,
you simply take it from another user who gave you money.
In other words, you rob Pete to pay Paul.
But, you see, the enemy of a Ponzi scheme
is people leaving your Ponzi scheme.
And that's what started happening in early 2018.
Bitcoin took a serious tumble.
[reporter 6] It's now down almost 50%.
[reporter 7] 60%.
The prices started to drop very quickly.
That created a rush by users to cash in on their profits.
Quadriga very quickly started to struggle fulfilling those withdrawal requests.
Cotten was fulfilling the requests of whoever was screaming the loudest.
He was really a fireman at that point,
extinguishing small fires where he could.
[man 7] Gerry's stuck in the maze.
[laughs]
[QCXINT] I've still got this image in my head of--
of Gerry kind of getting stuck
in this maze and running endlessly, you know,
round and round in circles, trying to find the way out.
That's kind of an ironic metaphor in some ways
for what happened with Quadriga.
And that's how Cotten was able to be the mastermind
and a conductor of this massive fraud all on his own.
In a typical situation, we would have taken enforcement action.
However, because Mr. Cotten was deceased,
we couldn't have our court hearing this case.
Okay, now scan the QR code…
[Taylor] Honestly, I'm still grappling with, like, the video
where he's showing the kid how to use the Bitcoin ATM.
[Gerry] Now put in the money.
You're running Ponzi schemes, robbing people of money.
Those same people probably, right?
The kid's dad probably put money on Quadriga.
How do you-- How do you do that?
[Gerry] Okay, now click "Send Bitcoins."
Done.
Um, we all hate Gerry Cotten. [scoffs]
He's, uh… The more I know about this dude,
like, the more I realize he was just basically, like, a psychopath.
This person apparently had no human compassion.
Uh, didn't care about people.
Scamming people's money. Didn't care about people losing their life savings.
So not only did he take away my…
money, in a sense, he took away…
my dream and one year of my life, just by stealing that money, right?
And I think that's more valuable than the money that he took away from me.
[Kimberly] I was personally
angry,
'cause we so ferociously defended him.
It lent to us looking like we were liars.
It lent to Jenny looking like she had lied.
Jenny was just as duped as everyone else, if not more,
because as much as everyone else lost money, she…
still has to question what she knows for sure
about the person that she chose to spend the rest of her life with.
[Tong] It's been two years since, um, Quadriga went under,
and our chances of getting all of our money back is very, very slim.
[Joe] I think when Bitcoin was booming,
people didn't necessarily question Quadriga
or the companies that they were dealing with.
You know, somebody like Gerry could take advantage of that trust.
This entire thing, Quadriga, the person behind it,
and my personal story as well was shaped by greed.
And…
I can be honest and say that I was-- I was greedy.
I think there are a number of reasons why there were so many conspiracy theories
around what happened at Quadriga.
A big part of it is that the story had a lot of strange elements from the get-go.
All of these coincidences that kind of inspires the imagination.
[reporter 12] Outraged investors want to exhume the founder's body
to make sure that he's actually dead.
If we exhumed Gerry's body right now, they will claim that's not his real body.
That's what they'll do. I promise you.
If you DNA test the body, then they'll say the DNA test is fake.
Yes, they will. They'll claim the DNA tester is part of the conspiracy.
We need hard fact evidence,
and the only place that can provide that is a little grave
that supposedly hosts Gerald Cotten's body.
[Andrew] Conspiracy theories breed in ignorance.
It makes it easier for people to draw wild speculations
because the authorities are not quickly enough
providing them accurate information.
'Cause if you force people on the Internet to be the detectives,
that's what they're gonna do, and they're gonna solve it their own way.
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