In Brief:
- Netflix will release a new documentary about the QuadrigaCX scam.
- The documentary will be released in 2022.
- Gerard Cotten died in 2018 just months before QuadrigaCX declared bankruptcy.
Netflix is releasing a new documentary on the QuadrigaCX Scandal. The documentary, titled “Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King,” will be based on the life of Gerald Cotten, the founder of a Canadian crypto exchange who died in India while on honeymoon in 2018, allegedly taking $250 million in customer funds with him.
According to a Netflix press release, the documentary will “follow a group of investors turned sleuths as they try to solve the strange death of bitcoin multimillionaire Gerry Cotten and the missing $250 million they believe he stole from them.”
Gerald Cotten was the founder of Quadriga Fintech Solutions and QuadrigaCX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada at that time. QuadrigaCX infamously went bankrupt in 2019. It owed 215.7 million Canadian Dollars and only held 28 million Canadian Dollars value in assets.
Some believed Cotten had staged his death and left with customer’s monies. Lawyers for out-of-pocket consumers asked Canadian police to dig up his tomb in December 2019 to make sure he was actually dead.
Most people now assume Cotten died of Crohn’s disease, but he didn’t take the keys to the customer funds with him to the grave.
Cotten had been attempting to remove assets from QuadrigaCX well before his death, according to postmortem findings from Ernst & Young, and spent it on luxury items like automobiles, planes, and yachts.
To accomplish this, Cotten created a fake QuadrigaCX account and then purchased his customers’ bitcoins with fake Canadian dollars. The Ethereum market, to which Cotten was heavily exposed, fell in 2018 and wiped off his entire fortune.
In crypto canon, Cotten would be the male version of the Crypto Queen, a character named by BBC journalist Jamie Bartlett in his hit radio report on the alleged Ponzi scam OneCoin. While QuadrigaCX cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Bartlett’s sources, OneCoin had pulled in as much as $15.8 billion as of early 2018.
BAFTA-nominated documentarian Luke Sewell directs the new Netflix documentary. Netflix also revealed that “Tiger King 2” will be released this year, as well as “The Tinder Swindler,” a film about a conman who pretended to be a rich playboy on Tinder.
