Just a thought: could Gerald Cotten have also been a stolen identity, as his co-founder Michael Patryn was (Michael Patryn was actually "Omar Dhanani who was convicted on identity theft charges in the U.S. and served 18 months in Federal prison"[0])? It would be much easier to fake the death of a stolen identity and reassume your real identity, rather than fake the death of your real identity and assume a stolen one for the rest of your life.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_Fintech_Solutions

“Identity theft” hardly ever refers to actually assuming someone else’s identity.

Yes, identity theft includes things as basic as using someone else's credit card. I learned that when I reported that someone rifled through our car, took a credit card, and tried to use it at a gas station.

It kinda surprised me.

This Mitchell and Webb skit feels relevant https://youtu.be/CS9ptA3Ya9E

He stole your money and both your identity (when making the transaction, as he is not authorized). Just pondering, not a lawyer.

It is rare relative to stolen credit cards. But I wouldn't call in excess of 700,000 cases/year to be "hardly ever".

See https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vit14.pdf for comparative numbers for 2012 and 2014.

That 700k is not referring to someone actually assuming someone elses identity. A tiny fraction of them might be, but tax return fraud or unemployment fraud seem like far more likely options.

How can you steal an identity and travel in today's world? There are only a few countries that still make passport which are not biometric.

Apparently it's quite easy if you have a passport from a country considered wealthy (e.g. EU).

>According to document sellers, it is impossible to fake a working biometric chip, but at many border crossings officials checking passports simply ignore those that don’t work, waving the passport holder through.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/revealed-how-f...

Wow. So they collected all this data and complicated all these lives and in the end... the system doesn't work?

Obviously. The authoritarian impulse is rooted in control, not ultimate effectiveness.

He has a pilots licence. There is a podcast about this that explains it well but basically it's not hard with that kind of money.

Is there some kind of contest to produce the most outlandish explanations of this matter?

As an total outsider I’m accustomed to the cryptocurrency echobubble blaring like a sackful of unhinged hyenas, but the apoplectic conspiracy-mongerong on display seems off the scale.

Partnered with the guy from this recent story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120762 ("Wonderland Crypto Co-Founder Revealed to Be Infamous Fraudster, Investors Shaken")

Scammers all around

This dude is 100% alive.

Death due to Crohns related whatever at that age is extremely rare, especially when they mention he was otherwise young and healthy (if I misread or am misremembering about the otherwise healthy part, correct me)

& somebody with that sort of money, that also spends $90k at a La Z Boy to furnish a house, would be 9001% on top of any possible thing that Crohns could do to him.

Guarantee he’s alive & he otherwise would’ve gotten away with it if they went with a story of any other medical condition that can lead to sudden death.

(I realize this may sound insensitive to those with or knowing somebody with Crohns. I have Crohns :P)

I don't know why this is downvoted. I also have Crohn's and it is word-for-word true. Sudden death of Crohn's is something I cannot imagine and I've been trying for good 5 minutes now.

My Crohn's is under control and has always been fairly mild, but having spent a week in hospital when it was at its worst I can see how this could happen, I lost enough blood for the doctors to be very concerned. A severe flare can definitely be life threatening.

I'm cherry picking a stat from this article, but it doesn't appear totally out of the realm of possibility to die from Crohns.

It is well accepted that Crohn's disease is associated with a small but real risk of death. Population based reports from Sweden,1,2 Denmark,3 and Italy4 indicate that Crohn's disease patients have a higher mortality rate than expected, although at least one notable exception from the UK demonstrated survival similar to the general population (table 1 1).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1856159/

Maybe it's downvoted for the "guarantee he's alive" - Even if sudden death from Crohn's is unlikely, would suicide also be plausible, if the stolen funds were starting to catch up with him?

Perhaps I should’ve said “he definitely didn’t die of Crohns somewhere in India” - yeah, I admit he could be dead by this point for various other reasons.

As for some other comments - until you’re very old, I think the statistics are that you’re much more likely to die from a surgery that tries to better manage your Crohns than of anything Crohns can cause.

Sometimes the surgeries can go very badly very quickly for no rhyme or reason & lead to bowel rupture which is very not good. Not that this is common - just more common than “dying” of Crohns.

I've seen it stated that he died of "complications from Crohn's disease" which in my mind would include a surgery gone wrong. I had an unexpected surgery which required anesthesia during a trip abroad myself, it's likely the chances of death from the surgery or event itself were somewhere in the 0.1-1% range.

I'm otherwise young-ish and healthy, and didn't know I had Crohn's before this happened, though I've had intermittent digestive issues that I thought "weren't a big deal" through most of my adulthood. I can only imagine someone who already knew they had Crohn's had it worse than myself.

Severity of Crohn's isn't age related, Crohn's is actually a young person disease. I was diagnosed in my 40s and that was considered a late diagnosis.

Also, the article says he died from complications from Crohn's.

I imagine it's incredibly painful and involves toxic megacolon. Took me about 15 seconds the first time I saw that the cause of death was Crohn's.

IBS person here, my understanding is chrons takes years, and is very medically mature. odd

> chrons takes years, and is very medically mature

Sorry, what does that actually mean?

There are really good treatments for it these days. People live with it relatively comfortably when they can get the right medicine, while in the past they would have died early painful deaths.

Does seem plausible that underlying crohn’s mixed with a vicious antibiotic resistant gut infection could be a killer combo

Lol maybe because he was over 9000 percent sure...

I have Crohns also, and basically have no effects from it besides occasional bloating and slightly-more-than-normal pooping 99% of the time. Strangely, the one massive event that occurred happened while traveling (ended up requiring surgery, which, which theoretically could have killed me). I also travelled in India for a few weeks (where Cotten died) and was fine with the food until a flare-up on the plane trip home (Delhi belly is a common thing among tourists).

It does sound suspicious, but the idea of someone dying of Crohn's in India doesn't sound as extremely unlikely as you make it sound. Also, medical care in India is well below the standards of what we might be accustomed to in first-world countries.

FWIW, I believe it's more likely that something else happened (poison/assassination, or faking his death, or suicide) based on the information I've seen, but I think a sudden, unexpected death due to complications from Crohn's is certainly a possibility as well

High-end private medical care in India is actually quite good. It's the public hospitals you really don't want to end up in.

After pricing furniture at La-Z-Boy recently, I could see where 90K could be used to furnish a few rooms in a house. I was looking at a new living room set and it was close to 45K by the time we had finished customizing the fabric, seat fill, and adding options to the furniture.

There are other things that seem weird about this, but, the furniture store pricing wasn't one of them.

Wouldn’t he pick a better cause of death, then? A heart valve defect or fell off a boat in the ocean?

The best lies are half-truths. Maybe he actually has Crohns and there's enough documentation to make this story (half-)plausible.

(just offering one possible answer to this question - I don't know any facts about this case)

I think that is why evan__ suggested the heart valve defect, a genetic condition that often goes undetected until it kills you. You often hear of stories of young, athletic people dropping dead and being linked to some defect they've had since birth that went undetected.

I'm close to someone who has it, and I have to admit that my first response was also: "uh, what?". However it can happen.

I guess my main reason for believing it is that I can think of many more plausible sudden death explanations. Drug overdose, accident, aneurism, heart defect, these can all kill without warning. So why come up with a cover story that isn't plausible?

i know, sample size 1, but my roommate in college had Crohns and died at 23 from it very suddenly

Do you mind sharing what happened (if you know)? I recently learned I have Crohn's and am trying to learn more about the things that can happen.

i looked into it more and it was apparently actually unrelated to his crohns, hopefully my anecdote doesnt cause you undue stress

Thank you for following up!

The Crohn's related deaths I've read about have been from complications from surgery, extreme blood loss and suicide (people with extreme cases can't deal with the pain).

Well did the coins on the wallets allegedly belonging to the dead man move?

Go watch Dead Mans Switch...you'll see it much more complex than that and even with some really deep forensic analysis they never found where the coins were (if there were really any left)

Shouldnt one be able to see if the currency is transfered?

> I realize this may sound insensitive to those with or knowing somebody with Crohns. I have Crohns :P)

The old "I'm not insensitive about X because I can claim to have X in an anonymous forum" defense, deployed preemptively at that.

You can find me pretty easily from my username as well as a fairly long history of my posts about my medical issues.

If I were going to LARP on HN, I’d find something much more fun to LARP about. I only really mentioned it because after writing things out I definitely saw how it might look like I’m trying to be a dick commenting on things I’d presumably not know much about.

I try not to reply, but I probably owe you some clarification.

My point was that disclaimers to the effect of "no offense but" are almost always useless, no matter how qualified[1]. Familiarity with the plight of another doesn't make insensitivity about it impossible. Whether you actually have Crohn's or not is a moot point in the face of this.

1 - the sheer preponderance of such disclaimers sometimes makes me wonder if there actually are such linguistic "get out of jail free" cards and I'm the only one who doesn't have the common sense to understand it.

The bbc article is eye opening her objection to an investigation is very telling, she has those peoples money and she is not giving it back willingly. I think the walrus article could be a paid promotion considering its missing this or any push back.

I agree. Hanlon’s razor doesn’t apply when you “incompetently” take hundreds of millions of dollars and don’t give them back.

The guy could have bribed the doctors and the wife might not be in on it.

You should read the article and the backstory. She did some very peculiar things with shifting assets around shortly before he "died".

I read the post's article, and the two articles in the top-level comment. Transferring real estate into a trust isn't a viable way to keep ill gotten gains from a bankruptcy court. Selling assets would only be sketchy if she attempted to divert some of that money, which isn't mentioned (and I'm sure those transactions received intense scrutiny). What other peculiar things did she do?

It seems like for the "mastermind theory", the last thing one would ever want to do is bring someone into the fold who would stay behind and knowingly shoulder all the legal trouble. And from her perspective, getting married and being named executor would be a terrible idea drastically increasing her involvement - an unmarried "girlfriend" could passively walk away while the legal system did its thing.

If this was an exit scam, it seems highly likely that Robertson was an unwitting patsy. Granted, encouraging this conclusion is a large part of why she'd write a book. But I just don't see how the alternative would make sense in the slightest.

> Transferring real estate into a trust isn't a viable way to keep ill gotten gains from a bankruptcy court. Selling assets would only be sketchy if she attempted to divert some of that money, which isn't mentioned (and I'm sure those transactions received intense scrutiny).

I get the sense from the various posts and book excerpts and her podcast appearance that she isn't the sharpest tool in the shed nor a criminal mastermind, so to speak.

How does that support what you implied in your earlier comment? From what I see the incentives are just all wrong. Based on my limited reading, she appears as someone working within the legal system to keep her (ill gotten) wealth. You can condemn her for that, but it's a far cry from being in on some larger plan of faking her husband's death. And her not being "the sharpest tool in the shed" is even more evidence against her knowingly being part of a larger plan.

The impression I get reading her statements is that they belong to a lawyer-constructed narrative which makes it difficult to form an accurate opinion.