User Reviews

I watched this, and while I found it entertaining, it raised more questions than answers. I can't fathom why they didn't interview or at least investigate in more depth certain people. No interview with the reluctant wife I can understand, but what about Cotten's parents? Was the shady doctor the only staff at the hospital that the reporter talked to? I can think of a dozen questions that go unanswered. Ultimately, this documentary was a bit disappointing.

The documentary is about an understandably disgruntled group of duped investors, who started an "online investigation" on the untimely demise of Cotten, the founder of Quadriga, a cryptocurrency scam scheme. Cotten died during a trip to India with his mysterious wife Jen. But the documentary doesn't clarify much about Cotten or whatever happened to the $150.000 million he allegedly embezzled.

Quadriga, the shiny Canadian cryptocurrency company created by Cotten attracted young, nerdy, greedy guys who wanted to be millionaires before the age of 30 and invested all their money in an online company about which they knew next to nothing, just to show to the world how smart they were... and they ended with nothing because Cotten was smarter than them.

Reading the other reviews it seems like what struck most the audience was the misfortunate guy who invested all his money ($400.000) to save the 2% a bank would have charged him for a withdrawal. Not only that, but this guy's desperate move was fuelled by the fact that he took a loan for $85.000 to invest in cryptocurrency, and when the value started to drop, he had to withdraw what he could and even sell his house to pay his debt and start over... with exactly nothing, because he invested in Gerry Cotten's Ponzi scheme, AKA QuadrigaCX.

All this sounds so unreal because taking place in the online universe but having no money left is a real enough situation and while Cotten owned some $11 million in tangible assets, his investors lost everything.

Jen was not available to be interviewed, so the big mystery lies with her: did she kill Cotten? Did she help him to disappear? Was she duped like the investors? The investigation should have been a tad more accurate but perhaps the sense of irreality proves the intangibility of this new, albeit still cruel world some people live in.

Over the next few years this same story will be told again many times, when you allow an international Ponzi scheme to go on for so long and I'm talking about cryptocurrency as a whole, unregulated, this is what happens. There's many exchanges across the world that have popped up and down in no time claiming to be regulated by FCA etc but ultimately until serious regulation is in place, this space will remain the Wild West.

The guy that transferred 400k in one transaction without doing any testing on that exchange needs his head testing.

Good documentary, if your not familiar with the world of crypto watch it, it shouldn't necessarily put you off investing, do your due diligence before you do.

The sister is as transparent as a pane of glass, don't believe a word she says.

For what it's worth, I doubt the death certificate is worth the paper it's written on, certainly not as much as the doctor received for producing it.

Good to see it's a movie, not a series. Netflix didn't stretch the story to endless episodes.

This story about a cryptocurrency scam will certainly resonate with a lot of people.

Greed feeds people to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, yet very few understand how they actually work.

That's why it's so attractive to scammers.

This is a solid documentary that provides simple enough information for would be victims of crypto scams. Watch out for the poor ratings given here by so called "experts" that want to trash this documentary in order to maintain the credibility of a continuous "decentralised" crypto business scam fuelled by greed.

I am a techie with 30 + years in the industry and I can assure you that the chances you will be scammed in the crypto world is very, very high.

Btw, are you a believer that the world will have a decentralised financial economy? Keep dreaming. The bits and coins of the darknet will continue to rejoice at your naïveté.

Why should anyone trust something that at best is only real in some sort of cyberspace locker? Most of us have seen a bank vault at least from the outside. It is an imposing thing and it isn't just for show. It is due to extreme measures being taken to protect currency and physical things of value In this it seems utterly stupid to trust something that isn't physical that who knows who might have access to. Maybe I am behind the technological curve, but the whole idea of crypto-currency seems like it is the worst idea to build one's financial life around.

This is a fascinating story of greed and crime based on what on the surface seems like a very unlikely criminal named Gerald Cotten. It's a mystery in that no one will likely ever be sure of how Cotten lost his investors monies. It's also somewhat unclear if Cotten did, in fact, die in India. What is known is that Cotten did engage in a criminal Ponzi scheme to fund his own self. There are other mysteries too such as did his co-founder have a hand in the criminal activity? Did his wife have knowledge as well as complicity in the crime? This doc exposes a lot of the bad stuff yet certainly it lacks some definitive answers. It is a good warning about how crypt-currencies aren't the answer to any kind of better monetary system. See it and come to your own conclusions. Personally after seeing this I can see why the value of these supposed financial instruments is unsafe and best avoided. In a way we should be glad this shot over the bough is a real warning.

Being a documentary/movie made on cryptocurrency, this is sure to get a lot of views. Once again netflix goes the route of speculative stories and tries to make something more confusing that cutting to the chase.

The good thing about this is that they did not drag this out unnecessarily and wrapped it up in 1.30 hours. Worth a watch but don't expect a lot.

Sorry, but it's hard to have much sympathy for people just as eager to get rich without working for it as the guy who defrauded them. It's all greed and it should be a lesson to these people that life isn't about cheating the system to make quick money so you can live the big life, have the fancy things, or as Tong said "keep up with your friends". Gerry died. The rest get to live with and hopefully learn from this.

WOW this was frustrating. So many questions and ended so abruptly. I think they prob should have done this in another five years time and see what else comes out. Leaves you with an empty feeling.

Crypto fascinated me when it first came out, but being old(er) I couldn't figure out how to buy it and then, spend it!! So I laughed it off.

When this documentary came out, I had to watch it.

Young people these days! Never cease to amaze me. What they come up with!!

It was interesting to hear what the group did when they were told about the death of the Cotten. Rather ingenious. Also interesting was seeing who was in their basements.

I gave this documentary 8 stars because it was so off the fricking wall! AND because of that poor guy who got into crypto to save 2% from the bank. The irony! Two stars belong to him.

Someone should exhume the body to see if this scam artist is really dead, it's that simple. I personally believe he faked his death and got away with the money.

This film bounces around between people, and groups of people who seem to be sharing new information about this Scam Artist, yet there is no tangible link between these various sleuths to say how they all shared their own piece of research.

Then you have a key character who wears a bizarre helmet/mask throughout who is never clearly identified. WTF ???

But the killer is that NO One, not even the Ontario Security Cops, demands an exhumation of the body in India, not only to confirm whose body it is but also the cause of death. If the Scam Artist is truly dead, then the circumstances of a otherwise healthy 30 year old man suddenly getting sick and dying within a 24 hour period certainly deserves investigation. It sounds to me like he was poisoned, but by whom ??? Perhaps it wasn't the wife but another partner in this Scam.

From what I know about Bitcoin, losing your money this way can only happen if you keep your money in a in a "community wallet" administered by a "Crypto-Bank" of sorts, which is what this Scam Company was. But NO One but YOU can access a "personal wallet" over which you have 100% control.

This film has less to do with Bitcoin, and more to do with Stupid People who happily invest their life savings into an investment that they've never researched beforehand. I don't care if the person who I give my money to is even my own brother or sister, because I would STILL Be A Fool if I didn't research the investment thoroughly BEFORE I handed over my money. Yet this film, like all others about Scam Artists of all types, seems to make the investors look like 100% Victims, but as in all such Fraud Cases the investors are victims primarily of there own Naivete and Gullibility, and they all got what they deserve IMO.

I have NO Doubt that the Scam Artist's body will be eventually exhumed for an autopsy, and NetFlix should've waited for that to happen before they produced this VERY Unsatisfying film.

If you love to watch thrilling documentary movies/series and belongs to crypto or stock market world, then surely go for it. You will get to know lots of insights of Bitcoin journey in last decades like it's boom, it's downfall, people's style of crazy investments, crypto exchange scams everything! It's completely safe to watch with family as well coz it doesn't have any nudity or any kind of violence in it. Well 6 Out of 10 Stars from my side, coz lot's of questions being unanswered here and they didn't solved the mystery as well they just made conspiracy that's it..

SCAM!! Stop wasting your time and money i lost all my investment over $78,000 with this scammer and i cant make a withdraw from the account keep telling me to make a fee even after making the payment i still can't make a withdraw from the account and i try to reach out to the customer service but no response so i try looking for a consultant mail: nick jover4 at gm com who help and guide me on step to claim back all my lost funds in the investment account which i follow and to my surprise i was able to get back all my lost including the bonus was refunds i cant believe my eye and i will recommend.

Okay the idea was good. Build up as well. Interviews and insights, great. But, that person with that mask speaking with the fictitious voice.. it was so!!! Annoying to me!!! He was so so so hard to understand. One should definitely have picked up on that. Whenever that person comes on it just kills it!

I get that his identity needs to be hidden.. but honestly, there must be a better solution for planning that out ?! This was a drag for me and annoyed me quite a lot.

As well.. many questions were still open at the end.. but the idea of doing a documentary about that whole issue was a good idea.

So let me get this straight. It starts off with a guy who does not want to pay taxes trying to scam a company because of a loophole in their system and finding out he got scammed.. then moves on to introduce a bunch of people who use an unregulated currency because they don't trust the government who get scammed and then...... ask the government for help... oh yea and these people lose money which is based on the fact that ownership is public ledger.. no one thinks to look there first.. must I go on?

If you propose a new form of money whose main attraction is that it is free of governmental control, it almost stands to reason that the users and service providers are going to be biased towards those people who stand most to gain from this benefit; and the people who suffer most from governmental power are those who want to engage in activities that governmental deem criminal. Thus, it's no surprise that crime is well represented in the cryptocurrency space; criminals seek to launder their fortunes in crypto, but also, many fraudsters prey off crypto "investors". The fact that said investors are generally looking to make a quick buck themselves makes them perfect marks for a scam. The story of Quadriga QX is amazing - two proven fraudsters establish a cryptocurrency exchange, make off with all the money, then one dies in peculiar circumstances and, because of the "secure" way the technology works, no-one else can access whatever crypto they had left. This documentary puts together the story, albeit without much emphasis on the wider context: such stories are routine in crypto (indeed, the surviving founder has since been implicated in another scam) because, given the incentives in the industry, why wouldn't they? I enjoyed the film, but it misses a trick in not telling the wider story: how a nonsense theory of how crypto can save the world and make you rich at the same time has lured people into to a system that is in every respect worse than the financial orthodoxy it purports to replace.

A real story to start with. But this is a bunch of actors who perform badly pretending to act as people involved in the reality of this. Notice you can't find out the real names of any of the so called "participants" of this documentary? This is all fake drama from Netlifx.

Terrible. Lots of summations and bias theories rather than facts. All may be true but presented terribly. Tabloid documentary. Oh and The fox mask. .. My god.

It's basically a Reddit thread put on film. There is zero actual evidence about anything. It's all unverified, unsourced speculation from a bunch of people who very clearly have a reason to believe the worst. It's just 80 minutes of mostly burned customers spinning wild speculation based on nothing. No joke, one of the biggest "sources" is a Reddit account that claims to be an insider and everyone just acts like it's gospel and not some random person on the internet.

Then the last 10 minutes or so they show that everything in the first 80 minutes was never true and all these accusations are totally unfounded and should have never been taken seriously (even though they made a whole documentary about them lol).

You can't help but feel like they manufactured a whole story that they knew wasn't even remotely true to make an otherwise pretty mundane story of fraud into something more salacious.

I think the real scam is that this documentary was worth watching until the end waiting for some revelation... I want my 1 1/2 hours back!

Was formatted like there was going to be some big twist or reveal at the end and the story just isn't that deep. Should have been a straightforward short news story. I could retell the whole thing in few sentences and not miss anything. However for everyone in the reviews saying this is why you shouldn't use crypto I disagree, as long as we have media such as this to hold people responsible, checks and balances. Gerry Cotten ran an exchange, so that's like saying don't use the dollar because what Bernie Madoff and his investment firm did. Thanks to the blockchain private citizens interviewed in the film were able to see and investigate transactions. This documentary does show that you should do due (doo doo) diligence before buying crypto and via what platform. This doc should spur an investor to do research before spending. Of course there is fraud any place a devious-minded person can exploit, always been and always will be there.

A brilliant documentary well researched and well put together. It was captivating throughout.

I'm still one of these people who is sceptical about all the online currency jargon, I can't begin to imagine what it must feel like to lose so much money. I too would be making Netflix documentaries trying to find this guy.