Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King Ending Explained-How did Gerry Cotten manage to defraud 200 million? Is Gerry Cotten still alive?

Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King is one of the latest Netflix documentaries released by Netflix, and the documentary is already receiving quite a good response worldwide. 

The series is about a Bitcoin entrepreneur named Gerald Cotten, who used to own a website called Quadriga CX. The Crypto website of Canada went live in 2013. Then after the mysterious death of the Bitcoin entrepreneur Gerald Cotten in 2018 during his honeymoon travel to India. It was speculated that he defrauded 250 million dollars and scammed people. 

Many believe that the entrepreneur is still alive, and he faked his death, and it was part of his exit scam so that he didn’t have to return the money. 

The Netflix documentary Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King has been released on Netflix, and it explains in detail the complete story. 

So after watching the series, if you still have some confusion regarding the series, do not worry. In this article, we will explain what happened to the Bitcoin entrepreneur Gerald Cotten. 

Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King Plot-Who is Gerald Cotten? and What is Quadriga CX? 

Gerald Cotten aka Gerry Cotten was a bitcoin enthusiast and an investor. He founded a website called Quadriga CX that was used for trading bitcoins. 

Originally the company was founded by Gerald Cotten and Michael Patryn in 2013. But, after 2016 Michael Patryn parted ways with the company, and therefore Gerald Cotten was the director and owner of the website. 

During 2016 when the crypto boom happened, the website became one of Canada’s largest crypto exchange websites. It started growing in popularity in the USA. More and more people began to lure to this website to buy and trade bitcoin. 

In 2016 the bitcoin price went from 11,000 dollars to 18,000 dollars. When the boom happened, the early investors of Bitcoin started getting rich. Therefore, more and more people began investing in bitcoin, and that’s how the Quadriga CX gained popularity and soon became one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. 

But this boom was short lives as from 2018, the bitcoin market crash started, and the price of the cryptocurrency dropped from 18 000 USD to $4 000 USD. The people who invested in bitcoins through Quadriga CX also started taking out money.

But after submitting a withdrawal request, their amount was not being transferred to their bank account from Quadriga, which resulted in their money being stuck permanently. 

One of such users was Tong, a Chinese Canadian who took almost a loan of $400 000 USD to invest in bitcoin but in 2018, when he tried to take out his money from the website; he wasn’t able to do so. 

When Tong reached out to their customer support, they replied the same thing it would be done within 2 to 3 weeks. Almost four months went away the users were still unable to retrieve their money from Quadriga. 

On January 19, 2019, the news broke that the CEO of Quadriga CX, Gerald Cotten has, mysteriously passed away during his visit to Jaipur, India, for his honeymoon. 

The Wife of Gerry Cotten, Jennifer Robertson, stated that Gerry died in India aged 30 due to Crohn’s disease. Soon shortly after his death, the crypto website Quadriga CX stopped working.

The board of Directors of the company stated that no one knew how to access the cryptocurrency, and Gerry was the only one who knew all the keys to the currency. 

When the story went wild, it became international news that Gerry Cotten, the CEO of Quadriga CX, passed away and took the keys with him, and all $200 million of customer holdings were locked inside. No one could access them. 

Ali, also one of the investors of Quadriga, and an AI consultant who was looking to start his own company, was also among the users affected by this massive scam.  He also shared his views on the whole scenario. To him, the entire story was staged, and he also raised valid points for the statement first, being that Jerry died on December 9, 2018. But on the company’s social media page, Jennifer issued the notice on January 14, 2019, which was one month after the CEO’s death, so something was not adding up to the whole story, that was for sure. 

Then a guy named QCXINT, who likes to keep his names anonymous, and who was also one of the affected users, also shared his views. He checked Gerry’s skype account it showed it was active days after his death which he thinks is impossible. 

When investigated, they found that people don’t die from Crohn’s disease, and the death rate is below 3%, so how did Gerry, who is just 30 years die from the disease. So did Gerry really die or did he just fake his own death and manage to defraud 200 million dollars, read on to find out the details. 

Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King Ending Explained: How did Gerry carry out the fraud? What was revealed at the end of the documentary? Is Gerry Cotten dead or alive?

Nathan Vaderklippe, one of The Globe and Mail reporters, was sent out to India to confirm Gerry’s death. 

Nathan visited Jaipur and found out the doctors named them and asked him about his death of Gerry. 

The Globe and Mail reporter Nathan reported the whole conversation with the doctor and the same was also showcased in Trust No One: The Hunt for  Crypto King documentary on Netflix: 

The Doctor who had treated Gerry stated the following: 

“Mr Cotten and Mrs Robertson arrived at 9: 45 PM and Cotten was admitted with the symptom of acute gastroenteritis as per the initial diagnosis, the Doctor revealed that at first impression it was a case of traveller’s diarrhoea, but sometimes on next noon Mr Cotten’s condition took sharp turn, and he became fulminant. Fulminant is a medical term describing severe deterioration. 

At 2: 45 PM on that day, Mr Cotten went into cardiac arrest. He was resuscitated, but his blood pressure was superficial, so he was put on a ventilator. He went into cardiac arrest once more, and he was resuscitated once more, but he could not be revived the third time. At 7: 26 PM, Mr Cotten was reported dead.”

But this also didn’t end the speculation as per the Doctor’s answers when he was asked about Gerry’s death; the Doctor revealed that his conclusion was based on one of the best guesses of what took a 30-year-old man from being in a luxury hotel to a death bed in a little more than 24 hours. 

Also, it was revealed that no autopsy was done on Mr Gerry Cotten, which was also one reason why the speculation didn’t stop. People who lost their money question why there was no autopsy done? 

When The Globe and Mail reporters asked for Gerry’s will from the court, they found out that the CEO had named all his assets to his wife’s name, and the most compelling thing here was that Mr Gerry Cotten’s Will was signed just two weeks before his India tour which was kind of suspicious as well. 

The suspicion soon fell on Cotten’s wife, Jennifer. And the People started speculating that Jenniffer poisoned Gerry to have all his key potentially wealth. And then, after Gerry’s death, she stated that Gerry died of Crohn’s disease. But there was no such evidence that happened, and all that was just speculation. 

Then at the end of the documentary, Daniel Tourabgeau of the Ontario Securities Commission, who was one of the investigators of the case, revealed that they came across a series of fake accounts by which Gerry had executed this massive fraud. 

Daniel revealed while investigating one of such names he came across was of ‘Specter Gerry’, and there were multiple fake accounts that were used to credit hundreds of millions of dollars of fake assets and tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies, so when users used to buy crypto from Quadriga CX, they used to see a message like your account has been credited with one bitcoin but unbeknownst to them that crypto never existed and it never was credited on their account. 

Cotten was crediting the user’s accounts with fake cryptocurrencies and was using the same money to invest in other platforms for trading. To simplify this further to our readers, Gerry basically gambled with users’ assets, but he was not good at trading as well. 

He lost most of the money, almost 150 Million dollars, he lost by gambling, and in 2018 when the crypto market crashed, and people tried to deposit their money, his whole plan failed and the Quadriga CX basically became a Ponzi scheme. 

In Ponzi Scheme, basically, you take money from one user to another. Still, the main enemy of a Ponzi scheme is people leaving the Ponzi scheme, so when the crypto crashed happened. The bitcoin price went down. 

People were in a rush to take their money out of Quadriga CX, that time Gerry was stuck between fulfilling the request of whoever screamed the loudest. 

And that is how the next step of fraud happened. As per Daniel Tourabgeaum, if Gerry was alive, they could have taken legal action against him, but they cannot have a court hearing as he is now dead. 

More than 115 000 people lost their money in the Quadriga scam. The probe found a little of 200 million dollars of money back but not the whole and the chances are even low now. 

The investors who lost all their money sent out letters to the authorities to exhume Gerry’s body to find out whether he was dead, but that hasn’t didn’t happened yet. 

However, Gerry’s wife Jennifer returned 12 million dollars as part of a voluntary settlement, but the rest is yet to be recovered.  

Gerry is still believed to be dead, but the speculation hasn’t stopped yet on whether he actually died or faked his death and is somewhere alive.