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thank you [Music] [Music] thank you foreign garage wherever you are whatever you're
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doing thanks for listening I am your host the captain and with me as always well forget about the guy that's with me
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as always he's locked in my basement it's good to be seen it's good to see you thanks for listening thanks for
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telling a friend [Music] and this week we're drinking Guinness Smooth Dark Stout that's creamy and
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texture and an after bite that's both bitter and sweet it's malty chocolatey and it has a subtle punch of coffee this
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classic Brew originates from Dublin Ireland although I'm told by the Irish that Guinness only lives up to its
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reputation on Irish soil regardless my dad calls it adult milkshake and I give Guinness four and a half out of five
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bottle caps to everybody that filled up the fridge this week cheers into my Irish mates I say lunch yes yes yes b
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double e double r u n Beer Run big shout to Lisa in Pottstown PA a big we like to
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jib to Kelly in Roseville California and Jen Lin and rivena Ohio and a big shout
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out over the pond to Rey and Cheshire England check out the store this week for our new Halloween teacher and
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Halloween ability and look for the Halloween posters coming to you soon and that is enough of the business grab a
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chair grab a beer and let's talk some true crime [Music] foreign [Music] Bitcoin is a digital or cryptocurrency
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with no Central Authority unlike with traditional government-issued currencies it was introduced in 2009
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and there are many Mysteries surrounding the founder of the technology however it
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seems to follow the ideas presented in a white paper by santoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin
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is not supported by any banks or government bodies it utilizes cryptography to maintain its security
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there are no physical coins or notes rather balances are reserved on a public Ledger with encrypted records all
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transactions are verified by using a mass computer generated process known as mining although major and developed
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countries including us UK and Canada allow its use official International laws regarding Bitcoin are lacking
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and it's not considered legal tender in any country with the recent exception of
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El Salvador join me and Justin from Generation Y as we look into the mysterious death of cryptocurrency
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millionaire Gerald cotton this is true crime garage [Music] foreign [Music] I'm doing well
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how are you well I'm doing okay but it's a Red Bull and Ritalin type of day I'm struggling a little
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old R and R yes well this individual that we're going to talk about he probably took some Ritalin I'm sure he
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did tonight's case is an interesting one would you call it a mysterious death yes or maybe a unexplained death we're
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talking about the Unexplained death of Gerald cotton who otherwise goes by uh Gary
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and he was running one of the or the largest crypto Exchange in Canada when somebody like that passes away it's not
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that big of a deal but he was very young at the time so that's where some questions come in among others yes he
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ran a crypto exchange called quadriga CX sounds like something from Star Trek yeah and for anyone that doesn't know
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what that is I would say think of a stock exchange you know any kind of exchange where you can buy and sell some
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type of good uh but because it's crypto people kind of their brain shuts off and
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they don't quite understand what cryptocurrencies are I think of them as stocks but you could actually use them
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to buy things too but do you have a better explanation Captain well his his business was a little different than
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most because it seemed like I could go onto their website and take a hundred dollars American
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dollars and buy a hundred dollars worth of crypto but it was not actually crypto
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in this case for his company I could be getting this wrong but it seems to me like it was a IOU for crypto and and
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that's not exactly out of the ordinary a lot of crypto exchanges might not be able to fill your order immediately
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right so they will have these little tags of ious whatever you want to call them and fulfill them over the next few
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days because they might not be able to do it immediately yeah but what's interesting about his model was that
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their company charged you to make the transaction so once you bought the hundred dollars and whoever sold you the
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hundred dollars both had to pay a fee so it wasn't just like some scam business the the company was making millions just
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upon transactions and he had a pretty normal life growing up and he would end up going to school for business
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administration at uh York University School of Business his parents were antique dealers he was just a very
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normal nerdy guy before he started dabbling in cryptocurrencies right he had a few business ventures before
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quadriga which we'll talk about later quadrica was as I said it it was a crypto exchange but in order
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to become the largest crypto Exchange in Canada you have to legitimize yourself you have
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to look like you are the real deal and he created this from the ground up with his business partner Michael Patron they
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established a board of directors they had a small office at one point there's another way to make yourself look legit
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and that's by creating fake user accounts to show that people are using your service and I know some podcasters will
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purchase you know reviews or followers for themselves to make themselves appear a little bit more legitimized and I
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personally don't care somebody does that but when it comes to a Exchange it might be a little disingenuous well
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it goes back to a couple things in one if you want to know what which podcast we're talking about we're going to
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reveal those in a second no we're not going to do that but if you go to iTunes and you see somebody's reviews that say
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this podcast is nice and then the next one is nice podcast this podcast is neat like chances are those are fake reviews
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that the podcast bought also we see it all the time where people buy followers on Instagram Facebook or whatever
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now this practice that they're using is similar to what dating websites would use so they would get these fake
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accounts 10 attractive females 10 attractive males and they would have these fake accounts going all the time
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so it seemed like there was a bunch of people using their site like Justin says maybe that's okay and maybe you don't
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frown upon on that too much on a dating site especially if it's free but on a cryptocurrency website where they're
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charging you per transaction to me that seems a little shady up front I I agree uh because if you are legit then you
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know maybe you can go out on Yelp or Google reviews and give yourself some good reviews but
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some of these fake accounts were like R2D2 or Mickey Mouse I mean it was blatant that they weren't real that's a
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that's a true crime garage's number one fan R2D2 he's partnered up with this Michael
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guy and things are going pretty well when they first started out they were actually a like
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over-the-counter exchange kind of like an ATM where you sh where you could like put your money in own some Bitcoin or
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whatever cryptocurrency and then you could withdraw money but that didn't really take off so they
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took this whole thing online which is the normal thing to do with cryptocurrencies that all happened they
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established the company in 2013 and by 2014 it was reported that they were doing like
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7.9 million dollars in exchanges a day and by 2017 they were doing over a billion dollars in transfers and
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exchanges a day wow and like I said there are charging they are charging their users for every transaction and it
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might be just fractions of pennies but still that adds up if I hadn't mentioned it Captain he's running this entire
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thing from oh yeah MacBook Pro when you hear this it seems so made up and when you start thinking of the idea
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of like a Ponzi scheme or something like that to me a company that is doing transactions like you said billions of
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dollars I'm expecting them to have a campus somewhere multiple buildings tons of
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employees once you find out that Gary is running the whole operation on his MacBook is it was it even a MacBook Pro
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I've read it both ways I don't think it really matters though I know that to me it's like I give him a little more Kudos
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if it's just a MacBook could you imagine if your laptop broke and you had to go to the Genius Bar and
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deal with one of those guys to try to get your billion dollar company back up and running yeah can you could you try
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to fix this before lunch because we're losing billions well obviously business is good uh his business partner
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Michael he's uh got a love for expensive cars and a lot of luxurious things in life and at this time you know from 2014
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to 2017 crypto is booming the prices are going up Bitcoin is gone from you know just thousands of dollars up to ten
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thousand dollars for one coin right but in 2017 things start to take a hit crypto's value is tanking so business
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investors would do they start to try to withdraw their money and normally you can just put in you know
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sell your crypto put in the withdrawal form and within 48 hours you're going to have your money in 48 hours I would say
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would be a long wait time right because usually at least in today's time you can
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have it pretty instantaneously if not within hours maybe in 2017 that process wasn't quite as panned out
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I mean when crypto first started back in the day it was hard to buy crypto there
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wasn't all of these exchanges and apps on your phone that you could buy you had to go to some shady sites to get it so
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investors are trying to withdraw they're not getting any response they're emailing customer service who's then
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telling them to open a trouble ticket then their treble tickets have an SLA or a you know service agreement time
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they're not hearing back some of them are waiting months so people are upset the investors who have
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hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars wrapped up in this are going online going on Reddit complaining about
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this and even starting to file lawsuits this is one of the things I heard that was that made their company unique is
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that it seems like other companies you would have to almost like apply to get your money out
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and theirs were supposed to be more like readily available so the fact that once people started
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trying to pull their money and they didn't have these stipulations in place this screwed them from the get-go they
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had what their what we call third-party processors and the only way I can explain this is if you go to say you
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know McDonald's or Starbucks when you pay for your coffee their Point of Sales Machine is probably owned by a third
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party who's going to process your credit card and do all those things well they have third-party processors one's called
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crypto Capital these processors take a fee also but with all of this legal rambling going on
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quadrika is blaming their third-party processors and blaming some of the banks they use for the Slowdown right this is
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just pointing the fingers and don't blame us they also have uh one of their fund holders is called custodian and
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they had I think 28 million dollars in funds and quadraka is saying no they're they have our funds and we can't pay you
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until they pay us right now let's go back for a second because back to these fake accounts right did you see a
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breakdown on on how they think that the company started kind of getting upside down no go ahead and explain it yeah so
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one of the things that they were doing is like but like we said he's running the whole company
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from his laptop what we should say is before Gary cotton gets involved I don't like calling him Gary I'm going to call
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him Gerald yeah that's fine old Gerald cotton gets involved they did have some buildings they did have a few employees
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but once he got involved no offices no nothing just his laptop well he could go on in the middle of the night and just
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basically create like a fake thousand Bitcoins and then he could start selling those to people and every
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time he's selling you know 100 bucks here 50 bucks here their company's making money off those
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transactions so he would do this and he actually created I think multiple fake people
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and I don't even know if his business partners knew he was doing this but it reminds me of Shawshank Redemption when
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you find out that Andy Dufresne created a fake guy and started funneling a bunch
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of money to that account so but then what happens is if let's say we have a million dollars in in the pot and I
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start adding money that was never there and now people are buying that eventually if I keep doing that once
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people go to take their money there's not going to be enough money in the pot you have to rob Peter to pay Paul the
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question then becomes to me for for these guys and and his you know Michael his his business partner why were they
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doing this because they were making millions to solve transactions cryptocurrency is like
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David Copper filled right it's like it's magic it's can't see it can't touch it but it's so
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funny to me that these guys that are getting into these crypto currencies like you were saying Michael for example
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had a love of expensive cars so they're using this fake entity basically and making money off this fake entity to buy
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actual material things I just kind of find that a little ironic regardless of whether this business is
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legitimate or not that's actually how a lot of places function it's almost like fake it till you make it right and
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you know if he can create fake Bitcoins to sell and dump them into the pool I mean
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that's just like the Federal Reserve just printing off more money right it's not that different to me but I could be
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off base there well no I still think it's hilarious that they're called the Federal Reserve they're not federal at
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all there is very clever name there is federal is Federal Express exactly at the time where these lawsuits
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and things are happening his business partner Michael actually steps down and is just a shareholder in
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the company at that point and Gerald is running the show Gerald at this point has his long-term girlfriend Jennifer
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Robertson he thinks that this is a good time to marry Jennifer make her the only
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employee listed at the company they're going to Honeymoon in India they had their eye on like uh sponsoring
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a orphanage for children in India I think there was 12 kids at this orphanage and you know that's nice it's
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you know they're trying to be giving and uh he walked in and he said I'll buy all 12 children yeah
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yeah no I'll take all 12. uh but they're trying to be philanthropists with their
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money and they get married they planned this trip to India for their honeymoon and they're going to go
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there and adopt or you know sponsor this orphanage do you know when they got married so they end up getting married
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June of 2018. I question that because right now the companies appears to be in turmoil and
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legal turmoil with all these lawsuits and the inability to pay off a lot of the investors yeah but when things
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aren't going good in life just get married it fixes everything yeah and they're going to Honeymoon in India
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but here's what's weird though is they get married in June they're basically waiting until
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December to Honeymoon yeah or they are they honeymooning for like months and months
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well they they wait a little bit and you know because you know sometimes you have
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to save up money for that honeymoon right when you're when you're running a billion dollar company off your MacBook
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guess what I'm gonna go buy this weekend a Macbook try to figure out how to start a billion
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dollar company yeah who's with me one of the interesting things about this case well maybe not interesting is the
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right word but maybe confusing and maybe one of the reasons why people start questioning everything that you hear
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about Gerald cotton is there's mixed reports just like we said they got married in June but they don't take
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their honeymoon till a few months later and it doesn't there's conflicting stories on when their honeymoon actually
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started and then there's conflicting stories on how many how many days was Gerald in India before he got sick and
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went to the hospital some Reports say a week some Reports say two days now I found that he went
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with his wife they checked in at the hotel and they went to a fondue party or a fondue restaurant now I know do you
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fondue I don't fondue myself I'm not the biggest fan uh well maybe you'd be a happier person if you did dipping things
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in cheese always makes them better Gerald cotton was known to have Crohn's disease okay
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which is I guess uh really bad IBS it causes you great gastrointestinal problems it's it's not something that we
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should take lightly it's not something that I I think oh it just had Crohn's disease that was it but
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look it could get very bad and and depending on their the type of flare-up that the individual would have you know
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I've had family members and stuff that have been hospitalized because of it so it's very it can be very serious I don't
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know how deadly it is I don't know how many people will die from a flare-up Gerald
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gets to India and some Reports say within 24 hours he's not only gone to the hospital for a
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flare-up but he's become septic and he dies from complications you know and I guess my whole problem is
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you know if you think okay you have Crohn's disease you're going to India maybe you go to a street vendor and you
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order something that looks like meat on a stick and I think that stuff's great by the way I love Street vendors myself
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I love taco trucks but the whole stereotype is he ate something bad in India and that caused him this
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distress but if we're going off the time frame of within two days of him arriving
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did he even have time to eat anything or was this flare-up happening on the plane
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are you saying he he was doing a 40 hour fast no but you I get what you're saying it's
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like saying like I have a bad stomach so when I go to Mexico the first thing I do
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is drink a gallon of water you know we're not supposed to do that yeah so is it yeah it's very strange
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um but here's one of the things that I kind of wonder his company's there's bad things happening in the
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company there's illegal things now happening in the company you are doing some of those illegal
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things you're creating fake characters and selling money that doesn't exist on in your business I wonder because of
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the Crohn's disease if he didn't also have like some ulcers and some other stuff that was going on
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to distress and that maybe he wasn't aware of because he's feeling like certain types of pain and certain
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but he's he's he's dismissing that as his Crohn's disease it's very possible I agree I would be stressed out just the
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fact that I'm running the company off of a MacBook he's at this Hospital he is declared dead
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his wife now organizes or you know sets up transport for his body to be transported
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I guess back to the hotel so they can find somebody to not really do an autopsy but do embalming
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because they've already got the uh diagnosis from the doctor at the hospital that he died from like acute
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gastrointestinal problems right so they find an embalmer they take his body there this embalmer says hey he didn't
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come directly from the hospital he's been moved around you didn't follow protocol I'm not going to embalm him so
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she takes his body back and they find a medical school Med students to do the embalming of his body this is
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India maybe there is protocols and procedures there's language barriers you know maybe this is legit but it seems
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like there's a lot of paperwork and moving around of his body at this point before she's able to get
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him embalmed and then arrange transport for him to go back to Canada to Nova Scotia where they live and the uh 12
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children at the orphanage they're left high and dry if I was one of those kids in that class I'd go you're a liar
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told me I was getting new shoes I'm not and that happens on December 8th is when he goes to the hospital nobody
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knows he's dead there's no announcements made nothing for a month quadriga is still business
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as usual people are still depositing money into it still trying to do their exchanges
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everything they have no clue but it's a month later that his wife posts it's a sad day
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my husband Gerald cotton has passed away [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] we're back thanks for listening cheers
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normally cheers to the crispy Colonel but uh I'm cheersing to you and uh this is recorded before we went to the
00:28:18
UK yes but I'm sure we're gonna have a couple drinks in the UK so I'm sure we will that's gonna be a fun time so let
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me try to wrap my head around all this they go to India they're they're less than 48 hours he goes to the hospital
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that's not to me that doesn't seem crazy when you find out that he has Crohn's disease
00:28:41
seems like something that's possible but then he dies and they won't embalm the body and they
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have to do this loop around where they get some college students to do it or they actually
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it was the little kids that they're trying to sponsor they're like we're going to have you embalm this body they
00:29:03
ship the body back to Canada and she doesn't tell any of his family members she just post it online
00:29:11
yeah Gerald had parents right have you seen any reports of them talking about his death not a lot trying
00:29:21
to find anything about it for that month period of time between his actual death
00:29:28
and her announcement I didn't find anything after that announcement you can find some some quotes
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and whatnot but at that point it's not exactly it just doesn't seem to be known by anyone or reported by anyone
00:29:45
I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate because I'm trying to go okay well if he's the only one really running the
00:29:51
company and we announced now that he died and maybe look we don't even know at this point if she can get into his
00:29:59
computer that is running the whole company well we'll get to that okay we will get to that I'm just saying that
00:30:06
like yes it's a little fishy that she doesn't announce it for a month but you wonder is there some complications
00:30:13
because he's running this business by himself where they didn't want to that maybe they didn't want a run
00:30:19
on their server you know and and have all the money disappear yeah but one of the things
00:30:27
I don't know if you want to get to this now but they were together for a long time years before they got married but
00:30:34
before they went to India a few weeks before they went to India Gerald changes his whole will yeah he's
00:30:44
leaving a lot of his stuff to his wife they had two cute little Chihuahuas he even leaves like it's reported that he
00:30:53
leaves a hundred thousand dollars to the dogs do we know what the Chihuahua's names are I don't know wow
00:31:02
Nick would have known you can just imagine at this point this has caused complete and utter turmoil with the
00:31:10
investors yeah and they're doubling down on coming after this company and trying to get their
00:31:17
money the Canada Revenue Agency and their security and policies uh folks are now coming after this company
00:31:31
they're finding that a lot of these accounts were fake they're finding that Gerald had
00:31:41
communicated under false aliases to different organizations they're finding that
00:31:49
the hospital in India where he was declared dead well the chairman who ran that hospital
00:32:00
had actually been convicted of fraud two months prior oh surprise to Gerald's death surprise surprise
00:32:07
my first question was it was it even a real Hospital I mean I don't live there I have never
00:32:15
stepped foot in the place but according to the documents sure it's a real Hospital ran by fake doctors this
00:32:24
government agency comes after Jennifer and says all right you need to hand over his laptop you need to hand over
00:32:30
everything related to the company including all the passwords and passphrases to access it and what does
00:32:37
Jennifer say I don't have them the own the sole owner and proprietor of this company who is
00:32:44
delegated on you know he was delegated all of his stuff to his wife who is the only employee of the company right
00:32:52
he dies and she doesn't have a single password I have a hard time trusting people when I see that they have a
00:32:58
password pass code on their phone like what are you trying to hide why do you why does everybody in this world
00:33:06
need a passcode I wonder what this laptop and this makes a difference if it's a Macbook or a MacBook Pro because
00:33:13
the MacBook Pro I was like the finger identifier so they could chop his finger off
00:33:20
and she could like carry that around on a keychain and use it to unlock the laptop they
00:33:27
find that he had made several transfers or deposits of money from the company to personal accounts
00:33:38
ranging from a hundred million dollars to tens of millions of dollars right before his death
00:33:47
and it said that his laptop alone had 250 million dollars in crypto locked up on it
00:33:58
Jesus quarter trillion dollars now he was buying some stuff he I don't think he was known to buy
00:34:06
sports cars or anything like that but he he did buy some properties and he bought
00:34:13
a six hundred thousand dollar yacht like hey that's baller money right yeah I'm not real you know I'm just I'm just
00:34:24
not really into cars I buy yacht he didn't even know how to sail at the time of this purchase right he literally had
00:34:33
to take sailing lessons you know normally when you teach your kid how to drive a stick you you let them figure it
00:34:40
out on like a Honda Civic from you know the 1980s you don't get them a Ferrari to figure out how to drive a stick but
00:34:49
here he is he's got all the money in the world he can do whatever he buys a six hundred thousand dollar yacht who does
00:34:55
he think he is Conor McGregor they find out that his wife Jennifer Robinson she's changed her name four
00:35:04
times now she had been married and divorced so some of those name changes could be
00:35:12
explained but how many times was she I mean look if you're married four times and you change your name four times fine
00:35:22
right it wasn't four times but why are you just changing your name for no reason as we can assume the Canadian uh
00:35:31
government and law law enforcement is not happy with this so they get search warrants and they raid his properties
00:35:39
they're able to recover some hard drives they're able to recover some of the funds that were missing
00:35:48
Ernst young had a the ability to do you know recovery on these drives and break some of the uh
00:35:57
encryptions I guess they found that an account for someone named Chris Markay had transactions in excess of 220
00:36:10
million dollars that's a lot but who is Chris martay exactly I mean I know who he is but do
00:36:18
you want to tell the listeners oh go go ahead go ahead sorry so this is also Gerald yeah this is an alias and and so
00:36:28
you said how repeat that number again I just want that to sink in for everybody in excess of 220 million
00:36:38
dollars of cryptocurrency to a fake person that is the richest fake person I've ever I've ever heard of if you had
00:36:48
a fake person right that you're going to give millions of dollars to what would you name him
00:36:53
do you have a name you'd go by like Batman or the captain TCG Captain uh just to get you and then
00:37:03
I was arrested no I would I would go by uh Andy Kaufman that would be perfect and every now and then when I'm at a bar
00:37:10
I'll say I like to say when they go well what's your real name I say Andy Kaufman
00:37:17
or I'll say um Bond Scott they find that he didn't do his personal property tax returns for
00:37:25
2014 2015 or 2017 and in 2016 when he actually did file he showed that he didn't make any profit well In fairness
00:37:36
all that profit was going to his the fake person he created then add insult to injury they're able to recover
00:37:44
some of these funds from these hard drives but remember those third-party processors I was talking about
00:37:50
they're saying hey they still owe us money and you need to give us any of those funds recovered
00:37:59
and those third-party processes are trying to recover those funds as opposed to those funds going back to the actual
00:38:06
individuals the investors now what's what's going on with his body so he was embalmed by medical students
00:38:14
he was sent back to Nova Scotia and they buried him right away well guess what give me a shovel
00:38:23
let's dig up his dead bones and and see what he has to say for himself the investors are pressuring the
00:38:34
government to exhume his body and do a DNA test yeah there was a court hearing I believe
00:38:40
last year or two years ago now um the only thing I could find and maybe you found something better than me
00:38:50
uh it seemed as if whatever hearing that they had where it seemed like they're going to win the hearing pretty easily
00:38:59
but then that's been like delayed now because of covet so yeah I don't know actually where the
00:39:06
investors stand on the digging up the dead bones well when there's over a quarter
00:39:15
trillion dollars at hand I'm sure they're not going to give up anytime soon yeah it's sad that we you know
00:39:23
this should be a simple I wish the world worked like take any judge right and you go look what what do we know for
00:39:34
certain we know that Gerald was scamming people out of his money therefore he was doing
00:39:40
something illegal therefore he'd become a prisoner right so in a sense he becomes property of the
00:39:48
state so I do not feel bad for him his wife or any of his family members that were
00:39:56
going to dig him up to get answers you know sometimes when they want to dig somebody up I go hey hey they didn't
00:40:05
do anything wrong we should stop you know especially these cases where it's like they dig up the body multiple times
00:40:12
and do multiple autopsies and it's like by the third autopsy it's like can you even buy anything that the doctor is
00:40:19
saying because at that point the body is so mutilated but in this case we would know
00:40:27
is there is there really a person there or is this guy off somewhere else and then he becomes a fugitive we talked
00:40:36
about other partners in crime here like his uh his buddy Michael uh yeah Patron now he he and Michael claimed
00:40:49
that they'd only known each other for about five years at the time that this happened so you know if you take they
00:40:55
started the company in you know 2013 ish and then he dies in 2018. you know that's about a five-year time
00:41:05
but as further investigations into this Michael guy goes they find that Michael used to run
00:41:14
a website that was the first kind of shady crypto exchange website he created this website
00:41:23
called Talk gold and Gerald as a teenager went and joined this website that's where he met
00:41:32
Michael they would go on to create other sites I think one was called s s Investments
00:41:42
and this had a crypto I guess currency called Midas gold and it was run by a I use bank with air
00:41:55
quotes called Liberty reserve and Liberty reserve was allegedly ran by an American in Costa Rica
00:42:07
who laundered money so you take your drug money you take your human trafficking money yes you go
00:42:16
to this website you buy this Midas gold second can you tell me that website again so I can write it down
00:42:24
it's not there anymore so you're saying so now what should I do with my drug money so they go there and
00:42:32
they buy this Midas gold which think it's processed however through Liberty reserve
00:42:39
who then would turn around convert it back into Fiat cash for a fee hand it back to you
00:42:49
essentially laundering the money that's awesome now Liberty reserves like real life
00:42:55
Ozark right yeah exactly but it's all digital online digital Reserve did not keep any records
00:43:05
of their clients any kind of database so you could track who was buying this and
00:43:11
withdrawing it yeah I'm going to call my call my company Liberty Federal Financial responsibly conservative
00:43:20
Reserve Liberty reserve was reported to have over 5 million users and over 8 billion
00:43:29
in assets so this is uh so basically what you're saying is investigators have now figured out that they they this
00:43:38
scheme this was a scheme all along and that they because that they were going like no matter
00:43:46
it's almost like they came up with this scheme and they didn't expect it to blow
00:43:51
up and become somewhat legitimate and it did and that actually throws a wrench into
00:43:57
their plan of just having a a scam service because quadrica quadriga CX was platformed on Liberty reserve
00:44:11
my God wow Michael Patron I don't know what his real name was because he was actually arrested for
00:44:22
identity fraud as Omar danani what's with everybody changing their names I just don't trust people that don't use
00:44:31
their real name you know those use your real name be honest people says the captain I have a boat I have a
00:44:42
yacht 600 000 600 million dollar yacht I'll just messing with you Gerald which is using alias's creating fake accounts
00:44:54
fake people we have Michael his partner using Alias is creating fake individuals
00:45:00
we have his wife that has changed her name multiple times some like like we said if you get
00:45:07
married and divorced and you can you know change your name there and and you'll change your name coming back
00:45:12
but it's still strange that she's changed her name multiple times I think that these investors are very justified in
00:45:23
their complete and utter disbelief that Gerald cotton has died but just one more detail for you his
00:45:31
name's Gerald cotton his last name is spelled c-o-t-t-e-n on his death certificate it's spelled
00:45:38
c-o-t-t-a-n he does have stomach issues that's why I'm like it's not impossible that
00:45:44
and with the stress that he look and I don't feel bad for him because he is the one that put the
00:45:51
stress on him I wouldn't put it past him that something bad happened or or maybe
00:45:59
even like committed suicide and for whatever reason his wife is covering it up because if she if he committed
00:46:09
suicide maybe she wouldn't get certain things so I want to put it past him that the
00:46:14
the death is not real not saying it is real I'm just saying it's possible people die in their 30s people die from
00:46:24
stress related complications especially with somebody that has something look Crohn's disease disease normally
00:46:35
will not cause death but if you're super stressed out because you're creating fake people and you're
00:46:41
creating fake money and you have millions and millions of dollars that are technically not real
00:46:46
and millions and millions of dollars that you owe to people and you don't have the money to fund that
00:46:53
because you just bought a giant yacht this can cause some stress issues so it's possible that he he could have died
00:47:05
I'm leaning towards now he didn't I would but I would bet my [ __ ] my cryptocurrency on the fact that
00:47:15
he's still alive now what's interesting though is in this case as as opposed to so many other mysterious deaths or
00:47:23
Unexplained Mysteries I think we're going to get answers to this because if they
00:47:30
finally get a judge to sign off to have his body exhumed we'll know and at that point it's either a there's
00:47:42
not going to be a body in that grave B there'll be somebody else's body in that grave or nobody right you think it's or
00:47:50
now okay now if we're going to bet cryptocurrency I'm betting he's not there right
00:47:59
but I'm also betting that there's just not a body and here's where I think he's screwed up
00:48:04
I don't mind so much that the death certificate has like the name spelled wrong because he was in a different
00:48:10
country here's what gets me because Gerald doesn't seem like a dumb guy so so here's here's my issue and this is
00:48:20
the part that pulls me back and now if you said okay you have to bet right I would bet that he's not in that
00:48:29
grave but if you said well you don't have to bet all of the money there's a 10 15
00:48:35
chance that I go this is real he actually died stress whatever and the proof is he could have been cremated
00:48:46
right and I don't even know like how well like DNA tests work on ashes so as long as I think you could get like
00:48:59
human remains you could come back and go well here it is you think about how easy
00:49:04
that would be yeah like why wasn't he cremated because that would have cleared the Slate here like he was
00:49:12
buried so there's still quote unquote evidence of his existence if she would have had him cremated
00:49:18
we wouldn't really be having this conversation because I don't know if they could actually do but that's what
00:49:23
I'm saying they dig up the body he's there I think maybe that's the tell that you know and maybe his family would
00:49:33
say I don't know I'm just saying like it's not that it's not that hard for I mean
00:49:38
we haven't I mean I've never sat around and thought about faking my death but I'm going hey you go to India you die
00:49:46
from this uh this stomach issues he had me cremated but because that didn't happen like you
00:49:54
said there is evidence so that that is that that little bit that goes maybe this is just
00:50:01
what happened it's possible I wonder if uh you know his buddy Michael what if he had him killed yeah but he
00:50:12
would have to be in cahoot I mean there's the wife right you would think unless it was a
00:50:20
plan just gone horribly wrong like I'm gonna kill him and get all the crypto and then kill the wife and get the rest
00:50:26
of the stuff or just get the crypto and take off I don't know I mean there's there's some theories there of
00:50:33
what could have happened I'm more or less he did this he faked his own death and he took off or like
00:50:42
you said he actually died of natural causes like the official story says but with the totality of evidence here the
00:50:51
totality of his just criminal behavior from a teenager on and every single person he engaged with
00:51:00
in their Shady Behavior I just I can't accept that this is real because it would be the worst possible
00:51:08
timing and the worst possible planning of getting married going on a honeymoon in
00:51:15
the middle of all of this and then dying right in the middle of it it's like what
00:51:19
would the chances that you're in agreeance with me where you say the big mistake in this whole plan would
00:51:27
be not to be cremated and you and I just wonder maybe there is some kind of background with his family
00:51:34
with religious or whatever that that wasn't an option in his plan and I think that there'll be a Manhunt for him
00:51:45
on a scale that uh we've never seen before and I if I was one of those you know multi-million dollars but you're
00:51:55
just not telling them if Justin's even your real name well if yeah if if I was you bet your ass I would be
00:52:05
hiring some Headhunters to go find him and there's so much more to this case I mean we tried to fit everything we could
00:52:12
into you know an hour but you can go down the rabbit hole there is so many more details so many more schemes Ponzi
00:52:22
schemes and and criminal acts that I just didn't even feel the need to mention because I want to be surprised
00:52:30
if they don't make some kind of documentary out of this because there's enough meat on the bones
00:52:37
to to chew on this one for a long time I would love to hear what your listeners think did this guy dive natural causes
00:52:45
or do you think he's uh sitting on some beach sipping on uh an expensive Margarita yeah so tell us your thoughts
00:52:55
at truecrime garage.com click on the blog and let us know what you think Justin it's always so great to hang out
00:53:04
with you thanks so much for joining us here in the garage and I look forward to hanging out no problem
00:53:10
and London with you awesome it's been my honor thank you so much cheers [Music] thank you so much for joining us here in
00:53:32
the garage for everything True Crime Check out true crime garage.com and make sure you go and listen to Generation Y
00:53:40
this week with Nick and Aaron or the crispy Colonel and Aaron and you can check Generation Y out wherever you
00:53:50
listen to podcasts until next week be good be kind and don't litter foreign [Music]