Experts finally cracked the laptop of the crypto CEO who died with sole access to $137 million. But the money was already gone

Jacob T. Swinney/Vimeo

Cracking the Quadriga case has been near impossible.

Millions of dollars were missing after a crypto CEO died without sharing the passwords to his accounts. Investigators cracked his laptop only to find the money was gone.

Gerald Cotten, founder of QuadrigaCX, was thought to have had sole access to the funds and coins exchanged on the cryptocurrency exchange. After his mysterious death in December, his colleagues said about $137 million in cryptocurrency, belonging to about 115,000 customers, was held offline in 'cold storage' and inaccessible.

The case has sparked numerous theories, including that he faked his own death and ran off with the cash. However, court-appointed auditor Ernst & Young was able to crack Cotten's laptop. What they found, according to an EY report dated March 1, the accounts had been emptied in April 2018, eight months before his death.

"In April 2018, the remaining bitcoin in the Identified Bitcoin Cold Wallets was transferred out bringing the balances down to nil," the report said.

The EY investigators found other issues too. Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials.

There were also 14 user accounts, all linked to Cotten, that traded on Quadriga's exchange and withdrew cryptocurrency to addresses not tied to Quadriga.

Burdened with $190 million in debt and unable to find or access the money, Quadriga filed for creditor protection in late January. A Nova Scotia court threw the company a lifeline this week, granting it a 45-day extension that prevents creditors from filing lawsuits against it until mid-April.

Kraken, another crypto exchange, is offering $100,000 for information on where Quadriga's cash has gone.

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