$500,000 Crypto Savings Lost After Trader Dies With Password

Quick take:

• A man speaks about losing his life savings to a crypto trader.
• The trader took the password of all his savings to the grave.
• The 33-year-old man lost savings worth $500,000.

In a 32-minute-long video that dropped on Youtube, a man speaks about losing his life savings to a trader. The 33-year-old man got involved with a cryptocurrency trader who passed away, taking the details, including the password to the assets, to the grave.

Tong Zou was one of the victims among thousands who lost their life savings following the mysterious death of Gerald Gerry Cotten in 2018.

Zou put C$500,000 in Quadriga CX, Canada's largest bitcoin exchange. His parents gave him a large portion of it.

However, when Cotten, the co-founder, died while on a honeymoon in India, the money appeared to be gone forever.

Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King, a new Netflix documentary, tells this horrifying story.

Losing a lifetime of savings

Tong mentions in his video that he lost $250k last year from crypto investing. He also took out three loans and sold his apartment to pay off the loans. He said that QuadrigaCX kept lying to the customers about the delay that was happening regarding the CIBC lawsuit.

Tong mentions in the video that “It just makes me more depressed about it.” “I could have invested it in real estate. I could have put it in stocks. “So far, nothing’s been found. It sucks.”

Quadriga held an estimated $250 million of its customers. An official investigation also concluded that Quadriga was an old-fashioned fraud embedded with modern technology.

Around 76,000 investors lost their life savings, just like Tong. Initially, the now-defunct business claimed that the delay was due to a legal dispute with a bank.

“I kept asking them: Where’s my money? – October, November, December – during all that time,” he said.“They kept saying it was the lawsuit. “I couldn’t get any sleep. I just prayed. I really prayed it wasn’t a scam.

“My parents were worried about it too. “At that time, there was nothing I could do. There was no way of getting my money back. “Once I deposited it, it was basically gone.”

Did Gerald fake his death?

Some people believe Cotten, who had Crohn's disease, is still alive. He died of severe stomach discomfort barely nine days into his honeymoon.

Jennifer Robertson, his wife, said that he promised to set up a system that would hand over the passwords to her before he died.

She claims that the passwords were never sent to her. Zou used a bitcoin strategy to avoid bank fees when relocating to Vancouver and transferring funds from a US account to a Canadian one. The 33-year-old has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to reclaim his funds but has so far been unsuccessful.