It’s coming on the seventh anniversary of Conor Woodman’s death.
The problem with that is, thankfully, he is alive and well.
Woodman, a UK-based author, director and TV personality hosted a National Geographic series called Scam City which ran from 2012-2014. In it, Woodman travelled to different parts of the world exposing common travel scams. In a 2012 episode based in New Delhi, he was able to purchase a legal death certificate for a cool $450 USD.
A short clip of the exchange is available on YouTube. Woodman meets a man in a dark alleyway and is handed a copy of the certificate proclaiming him deceased of a massive heart attack.
“It looks official,” Woodman says in the clip, adding that it’s been stamped and signed by the local registry of births and deaths.
In recent weeks, the clip has seen a surge of popularity, owing to being shared on two Reddit-hosted message boards for users of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX.
Quadriga’s founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, who lived in Nova Scotia, died in a Jaipur hospital in the northern state of Rajasthan while travelling in India in December due to complications of Crohn’s disease. According to his family, Cotten was there with his wife, Jennifer Robertson, opening an orphanage.
Despite a death certificate from Indian authorities and a statement of death from a Nova Scotia funeral home, an Indian police document giving permission to Robertson to transport Cotten’s body back to Canada, and confirmation from the hospital in which Cotten died about the circumstances surrounding his death, many of Quadriga’s users refuse to believe he is actually dead.
It sounds a little far-fetched, but given the circumstances perhaps not all that surprising: according to a Nova Scotia Supreme Court affidavit, Cotten was the only person with the password to access to $180 million in cryptocurrency within Quadriga’s “cold” wallets — a system which stores cryptocurrencies offline to avoid hacking — stored on his laptop. But some analysts and experts have told media there is little evidence of these wallets.
Quadriga is currently seeking creditor protection in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. On Feb. 5, the court granted a 30-day stay of proceedings against the company — time to search for the lost funds of Quadriga’s some 115,000 users.
A day later, after that stay was granted, according to media reports, court-appointed monitor Ernst and Young said Quadriga inadvertently transferred $468,675 of the $902,743 it was holding in hot wallets into cold wallets, which the company is also now unable to access.
“There is a culture quite ingrained, at least in my experience, of fraudulent paperwork circulating around in order to perpetrate insurance scams and a lot of foreigners are availing of that.”
- Conor Woodman
That, coupled with past liquidity issues and CIBC freezing $25.7million of Quadriga’s funds last year, as well as Cotten’s widow, who has been known by three different names, moving the couple’s Nova Scotia properties into a trust following his death, has led to speculation that Cotten isn’t actually dead, and given the whole case an air of the now-infamous Bre-X scandal.
It didn’t help skeptics that Quadriga was silent about Cotten’s death for more than a month, and that Cotten signed a will just a few weeks before he died.
Speaking with The Chronicle Herald last week, Woodman said faking his own death in New Delhi was startlingly easy and cheap.
“I don’t want to comment or say anything (about Cotten) in case the guy is genuinely dead and the family is genuinely grieving but I can say from my experience that I did fake my own death and I did it in India for a reason, because I think it’s the best place to do that,” he said.
“There is a culture quite ingrained, at least in my experience, of fraudulent paperwork circulating around in order to perpetrate insurance scams and a lot of foreigners are availing of that.”
The Chronicle Herald also spoke with several locals who did not want to be identified that confirmed that if you have the money and know the right people, you can buy many official documents in India, and the sheer size of the country and vastness of bureaucracy aids in that.
Woodman said the episode started out trying to illustrate how easy it was for travellers to commit insurance fraud, which he said is something backpackers will often do to fund their travel. He said the Delhi region, located around 250 km from Jaipur in the north of the country, is notorious for that kind of fraud.
“We secretly filmed a number of doctors who were complicit in that scam and were signing off various treatments which they weren’t actually prescribing. It was a ... deal between tourist and medical practitioner whereby in return for about $200 the medical practitioner would give you a certificate to say you had $2,000 worth of treatment,” Woodman said.
“Then, as a production team, we started asking ourselves ‘well how much further could you go with this?’ ... I think at the time, my life was sort of insured for somewhere around one million pounds sterling so we said ‘well that would be a hell of a scam.’”
A local fixer working with the show introduced Woodman to a man who, for $450, was able to procure a fully authenticated death certificate in just a couple of hours.
“Obviously I didn’t come back and put in a false insurance claim to see whether I would get away with that because that would have been a crime back in the UK,” Woodman said.
It’s not clear, however, whether or not Woodman’s death was reported to the authorities and recorded in the region’s births and deaths registry or if he was just sold a convincing looking document. In Cotten’s case, The Chronicle Herald was able to access an entry on his death via Rajasthan’s online statistical directory, though Cotten’s name is spelled ‘Cottan’ on both the certificate and the entry.
“My experience is you get what you pay for. I paid $450 for a death certificate. I wonder if I had paid ten times that, would I have gotten more supportive documentation? I think I probably could have,” Woodman said.
“Then you have to ask, well, if you actually want people to be compliant and make statements, that’s going to cost money, but if it was $450 for a death certificate, I don’t think we’re talking about an awful lot of money to build a web of deceit around that to make it even more believable.”
But Woodman said he wonders if anyone can truly disappear in the modern world.
“My concern would be how I would have pulled that off long term without ever being found,” he said. “And that issue probably would be much more expensive.”
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