INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightFacebook/QuadrigaImage caption
QuadrigaCX founder Gerald Cotten died without passing on passwords for his
laptop
Efforts to recover millions in crypto-cash from the digital wallets of a man who died without revealing passwords to
access them have hit a snag.The wallets have been found to be empty.The discovery was made by a firm appointed to oversee QuadrigaCX after
exchange's customers.Mr Cotten, who died in India in December, had sole responsibility for handling the funds and coins passing through the
The master key to unlock the wallets was held on Mr Cotten's laptop but he died without letting anyone else know the passphrase to unlock
Most of the digital cash that customers deposited with the exchange was supposed to be kept in "cold storage" to prevent it being hacked or
stolen.The cash represented the virtual currency holdings of 115,000 QuadrigaCX customers
Mr Cotten's death forced the closure of QuadrigaCX and auditor Ernst Young was appointed to wind it up.Its investigation has secured access
to Mr Cotten's laptop but also revealed that the digital wallets had been cleaned out months before he died
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
QuadrigaCX held the digital cash reserves of thousands of customers
In a report on its discovery, EY investigators said they did not know what had happened to the bitcoins they expected to find in
storage.However, the company said, it found evidence that Mr Cotten had 14 other user accounts "created outside the normal process" that may
have been used to trade on the QuadrigaCX exchange
EY is now trying to gather information about the trading done via these other accounts to see if it can trace how much crypto-cash passed
through them.A reward of $100,000 has been offered by one former QuadrigaCX customer for information about where the exchange's cash has
gone."The unregulated nature of cryptocurrency exchanges, plus the fact that so many use them to hold their coins rather than just exchange
them, invites fraud," said security expert Dr Alan Woodward from the University of Surrey."We really need exchanges to be regulated," he
"The big question is who would do that."He added: "If anyone is using an exchange to hold their coins I would encourage then to do the most
in-depth due diligence they possibly can."
