It looks like the debacle surrounding Quadriga CX – the infamous crypto exchange in Canada – is continuing to haunt people. Tong Zou – a 33-year-old man – is one of the many victims of the exchange’s closure, and he lost his entire life savings in the slip up.
Quadriga CX Is Still a Major Downfall for Many
The Quadriga CX mess occurred nearly four years ago in late 2018. Gerald Cotten – the man behind the exchange – was abroad in India when he succumbed to Crohn’s Disease and lost his life. Unfortunately, the passwords tied to the exchange went with him when he died, which caused every customer of Quadriga CX to lose access to their funds overnight.
The spectacle has exploded into something nobody could have anticipated, with several customers now pushing a class-action lawsuit against the exchange and even harassing Cotten’s widow Jennifer Robertson – who claims she does not have the necessary password information – as they work to get their money back. Cotten was only 30 years old when he died.
Tong Zou is one of thousands of people to have lost everything when Quadriga went kaput. It is estimated that he held as much as $500,000 Canadian dollars-worth of crypto in the exchange, much of which was given to him by his parents. When Cotten died in India, it looked like much of that money was lost forever. His story is now being covered in a new documentary on Netflix called “Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King.”
In an interview, Zou commented:
It just makes me more depressed about it. I could have invested it in real estate. I could have put it in stocks. So far, nothing’s been found. It sucks.
In the long run, it is believed that as much as $250 million of customers’ money may have been lost following Cotten’s death. However, things are now quite what they seem, and many crypto analysts and legal experts have labeled what happened with the exchange as a good old-fashioned scam. Some are even claiming that Cotten faked his own death and is living it up somewhere on the money left to him by unbeknownst traders of the exchange.
Was It the Bank’s Fault?
Quadriga executives allegedly tried to cover their tracks by claiming the problems stemmed from the bank supporting the exchange. The digital platform filed suit against the institution, but many traders remain unconvinced, including Zou. He said:
I kept asking them, ‘Where’s my money?’ October, November, December, during all that time. They kept saying it was the lawsuit. I couldn’t get any sleep. I just prayed. I really prayed it wasn’t a scam. My parents were worried about it, too. At that time, there was nothing I could do. There was no way of getting my money back. Once I deposited it, it was basically gone.
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/how-one-trader-lost-all-his-crypto-through-canadas-quadriga-cx/