If you spend much time online, it’s pretty common to hear the worlds of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the like described as “scams.” But while it’s certainly something of a financial wild west out there – albeit a wild west populated by bored apes and libertarian nightmare ships – crypto enthusiasts will usually say that such descriptors are at best hyperbole.
Sometimes, though, the people calling crypto schemes “scams” are bang on. Just ask Tong Zou: he lost half a million Canadian dollars – his entire life savings – in what investigators later called “an old-fashioned fraud wrapped in modern technology.”
“It just makes me more depressed about it,” he told Sky News. “I could have invested it in real estate. I could have put it in stocks.
“So far, nothing’s been found. It sucks.”
But how did Zou, along with tens of thousands of other crypto investors, lose such a gargantuan sum?
It all started about three years ago, when Gerald Cotten was reported dead at age 30 from complications with Crohn’s disease. Cotten was the co-founder and CEO of QuadrigaCX, the largest cryptocurrency exchange company in Canada, and according to his widow, he held “sole responsibility for handling the funds and coins” on the exchange.
With the information required to access the financial databases stored on a laptop protected by passwords known only to Cotten, QuadrigaCX was forced to…
