Manage your online security for free at dash line dot com slash r l l.

So what's the most that you think you could lose by forgetting a password for you and me?

Probably not very much.

But for a company called Quadriga, C X, a lost password ended up costing them approximately $190 million for reference.

That's more money than 6109 average Americans will earn combined during the entire year of 2019.

Imagine, for a moment how the economy and people's lives might be affected by over 6000 people losing a full year worth of money because one idiot lost a password.

Well, something like that basically just happened.

But how did a mistake this enormous even start?

Well, it kind of began with how Quadriga was founded as a company.

It's a Canadian crypto currency exchange that until this recent disaster was the largest crypto exchange in Canada.

A crypto exchange is basically a place online where you can trade crypto currencies or digital currencies for other assets like dollars, pounds, euros or yen, or vice versa.

The exchange charges fees on these transactions, and customers can store their crypto currencies that they own while they hopefully accumulate value.

Quadriga was co founded back in 2013 by then 25 year old Gerald Cotton, who apparently ran Canada's largest crypto exchange 100% entirely from just his laptop.

That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but Cotton was also apparently an extremely secretive person.

And on Lee, he actually knew the password to his computer.

By 2018, Quadriga had 115,000 customers, and all of their crypto currency funds at the exchange were stored on the stupid laptop in either hot wallets or cold wallets.

Hot wallets are connected to the Internet and are mostly used for quick withdrawals or payments with cryptocurrencies and store pretty small amounts basically like a checking account at a bank.

Cold wallets, on the other hand arm or like a savings account, the generally store a huge amount of cryptocurrencies and are kept disconnected from the Internet offline on a hard drive.

On the one hand, this keeps the funds stored inside of them pretty safe from hackers, since it's, you know, offline.

But on the other hand, it makes them almost impossible to access if you forget the password to the hard drive that they're all stored on.

So in December 2018, Cotton apparently went to India for a trip and died while they're due to complications from Crohn's disease.

You think that before he died, he would probably tell somebody, or, at the least, right down the password to his computer that was storing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies on it?

That probably would have been the smart thing to do.

But he also could have just died without telling anybody any of that.

And so he did, leaving $190 million worth of Bitcoin, ethereum, Light Point and others trapped inside of his computer and affecting over 100,000 people across the world who couldn't access their money anymore.

Cottons, Wife and air Jennifer Robertson appears to be leading the company now, And while she did file an affidavit with her husband's death certificate from the Indian government three days after his alleged death, it took the company of Quadriga itself nearly an entire month to announce to their customers his unexpected death and the problem with accessing their $190 million.

Security experts have been hired to try and beat the laptops encryption, but so far nobody has been successful in breaking it.

Further complicating things for Quadriga, a lot of people think that this entire thing sounds pretty fishy and convenient.

For example, why was the entire business run from the CEO's laptop?

Quadriga has no offices and no bank account, which is unusual for a company of this size.

Why was the entire business and operation run from a single laptop?

That only one person knew the password to the transfer of funds between the cold wallet and the hot wallet were always just done manually by cotton whenever customers requested withdrawals.

But why didn't he ever write anything down or tell anybody else the password, especially right before his impending death?

While in India, his wife has claimed that she searched through their entire house and found nothing that could help with accessing the laptop.

So the $190 million question is, Was Gerald Cotton actually dumb enough to not tell anybody else's password and dive with the secret?

Or did Gerald Cotton actually just pull off an elaborate hoax and faked his own death toe hopefully escape with all of the money.

Very few people probably know the answer to that question at the moment, and only time will tell if you're watching this video from the future and know the answers and let the rest of us know down in the comments.

115,000 people may have just lost nearly $200 million because one guy died without telling anybody else's password, which really sucks, but it all could have easily been avoided if he was just using Dash Lane.

Funny enough.

Dash Line has an emergency contact feature where you can give access to a family member or business colleagues to your account so they can access your unique passwords in case of an extreme situation like, you know, the CEO of your company, dying with only him knowing the password.

But even if you're not a CEO who might destroy your entire company by dying, Dash Lane can really help out everybody.

Dash line helps you create different super secure, nearly unbreakable passwords for every site that you use auto fills than when you goto log in and protects all of them behind just one super secure password that you need to remember.

It's very important to be using different passwords for different sites for your own safety, and nothing makes it easier than not having to remember them all.

And that's what Dash Lane does.

Something this useful is probably pretty expensive, except it's not.

It's free when you go to dash line dot com slash r l l.

Or by clicking the link in the description.

Dash Line has more pretty cool premium features to help protect you online even more like a VPN sinking across devices and dark Web monitoring, which you can get for 10% off by using the code R L while upgrading.

Thank you for watching, and I'll see you next week for another brand new video, then.