Accountancy firm Ernst & Young (EY) has denied moving funds mistakenly transferred three years ago to cold wallets associated with the collapsed Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX
EY is the court-appointed monitor and Trustee in Bankruptcy overseeing the unwinding of QuadrigaCX and is also tasked with retrieving stranded funds.
It had not previously been clear whether the wallets were still active, and it remains unclear who could have recently moved the Bitcoin.
EY has not yet offered any insight as to who may have moved the Bitcoin on Monday and how they were mistakenly sent to the cold wallets back in 2019.
QuadrigaCX abruptly shuttered in February 2019, leaving millions in customer funds stranded in apparently inaccessible offline cold wallets.
The exchange’s CEO, Gerald Cotten, had sole responsibility for moving funds offline, but the addresses of the cold wallets were apparently known only to him
EY was subsequently appointed to try and claw back losses on behalf of customers and announced the exchange’s mistaken transfer of 103 Bitcoin to five different QuadrigaCX cold wallets that it claimed it couldn’t access
Amateur investigators were able to find five wallets that had received roughly the same amount by way of several small transactions
An alleged accomplice of Cotten claimed that the funds had been transferred by a QuadrigaCX employee acting under instructions from EY
It was later found that the missing funds were largely not stranded in cold wallets but had been gambled away by Cotten, who operated the exchange as a Ponzi scheme and personal piggy bank
The exchange has been in Canadian bankruptcy court for a number of years.
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