The wallets of the deceased owner of a crypto exchange with $137 million were opened, but there was no money there

The consulting company Ernst & Young, which, on behalf of the court, was engaged in the control of the funds of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, as part of the investigation, was able to access the wallets of the deceased owner of the company - the funds of 115 thousand clients were supposed to be stored there, but there was no money in them. The court gave the crypto exchange another 45 days to search for the missing assets.

More. After the sudden death of the owner of the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange, Jerry Cotten, no one could open wallets (depositories), the passwords for which only Cotten himself knew. Representatives of the QuadrigaCX exchange reported that the money was still in the wallets, but in reality everything turned out to be wrong - $ 137 million was not there, and all the money was withdrawn during 2018.

In total, Ernst & Young found six "cold" wallets - most often these are devices that are disconnected from the Internet in order to further protect funds from virtual theft. To work with them, they are connected to a regular computer. Five wallets were empty back in April 2018, another was used as an intermediate to transfer money from one account to another - funds were stored on it until December 2018.
From 2014 to 2018, the average monthly cumulative account balance was 124 bitcoins, which is almost $460,000.
As part of the investigation, Ernst & Young also found 14 accounts that were created "outside of the standard procedure" for registering. They were also used to trade on various exchanges.
The Canadian court gave the crypto exchange another 45 days to search for the missing assets and ordered the Amazon Web Services cloud service to transfer data stored in the personal account of former QuadrigaCX CEO Gerald Cotten in order to expedite the investigation.

Context. After the death of the 30-year-old founder of the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange, the company lost almost $137 million, it became known in February 2019.

According to the founder's wife, Cotten died of Crohn's disease in India.
The administration of QuadrigaCX announced that it had lost access to customer funds on February 2.
Exchange clients were outraged and accused Gerald Cotten of faking his own death.
Back in January, QuadrigaCX filed an application with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court. The company expects the court to recognize its financial difficulties.

Anna Kovalenko