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A possible exit scam related to both cryptic and regular money has lost $190 million in money. It’s a scam that had to do with the Canadian QuadrigaCX scholarship. The company states that it can no longer access the money.

The company behind the fraud, QuadrigaCX, claims that his 30-year-old founder, Gerald Cotten, died of Crohn’s disease while in India. Cotten would be the only person with access to the company’s wallets. For this reason, it was no longer able to access the funds it manages.

Millions of dollars

We have thousands of wallet addresses belonging to QuadrigaCX and we are investigating this bizarre and frankly unbelievable story of the founder’s death and the lost keys, says CEO Jesse Powell of Kraken Inc. to the CCN site. I don’t normally call for subpoenas, but if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police happens to be looking at this, please contact Kraken.

A message dated 31 January showed that QuadrigaCX had approximately 26,500 bitcoin, 11,000 bitcoin cash, 35,000 bitcoin gold, 200,000 litecoin and 430,000 ethereum under its control. The total value of this was 147 million dollars. But there was also 43 million dollars in money in the company’s bank accounts.

To the judge

The chance that the company has actually lost access to its keys seems rather small. There are reports on several sites that money has been moved from the wallets. That would be impossible, if QuadrigaCX would actually no longer have access to its wallets. On Reddit, a user also writes that there are several cases where litecoin has been removed from wallets, even after the founder of the company has passed away.

Another researcher also claims that the scholarship never had as much bitcoin in management as it claimed. Ultimately, it will be up to a judge to determine whether or not there has been any fraud. But according to analyst Peter Todd, who spoke with CCN, this is presumably the case. The people trying to perform an exit scam via QuadrigaCX could be family members or other employees hiding the fact that the cold wallet keys are simply known.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.