Basically the founder lived the high life with his partner, multiple houses, a yacht, etc etc, and it looked like a stunningly successful and honest exchange. He died in India when he was there apparently building orphanages.
It turns out that he ran the entire thing from his laptop and nobody else could get in as he didn't share the passwords to anything. It further turns out that when people started investigating properly, the whole enterprise was insolvent, because he had viewed the customer funds and company funds as personal funds, 'normal' money and cryptocurrency alike, and he had gambled most of the cryptocurrency away in bad trades on other exchanges, and most/all of the 'fiat' was gone too. He also turns out to have had a history of involvement in scammy 'hyper-growth investment!' stuff.
His death looks very convenient, and IIRC his widow won't allow the body to be exhumed and checked to make sure it's really him (it probably is, I have no idea). The funds were gone.
As a neutral observer, she sounded somewhat believable, especially since she basically was along for the ride, and has almost nothing to show for the scam (and a lot of downside from being the person targeted by the ire of depositors)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/jennifer-robertso...
> The company's CEO and founder, Gerald William Cotten (born 11 May 1988),[2] died in 2018 after traveling to India. Up to C$250 million (US$190 million) in cryptocurrency owed to 115,000 customers was missing[3] or could not be accessed because only Cotten held the password to off-line cold wallets.[4][5][6]
> Blockchain analysts have reported that they are unable to find evidence of Quadriga's cold wallets on the blockchain, a public ledger used for cryptocurrencies.[37][38]
> Ernst & Young found five Quadriga cold wallet addresses, but they were empty, containing no cryptocurrency since April 2018.
https://amycastor.com/2019/02/12/how-the-hell-did-we-get-her...
