Former BitTorrent engineer lost $422,000 in crypto on QuadrigaCX

Former BitTorrent engineer lost $422,000 in crypto on QuadrigaCX

Tong Zou, a 30-year-old, former BitTorrent and Walmart software engineer has lost all of his life savings, a total of $422,000 in crypto on the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX.

‘It’s all my savings, so I’m just living on what little I have left and trying to start over’, Zou told Bloomberg in a phone interview.

He has been living out of an AirBnB in Vancouver, Canada, for the last month. QuadrigaCX ‘pretty much took everything away from me’, he said.

Zou is one of Quadriga’s 115,000 clients who have been duped out of their funds, ever since the sudden death of QuadrigaCX founder and CEO Gerald Cotten.

However, Zou wasn’t your typical cryptocurrency trader.

The 30-year-old software engineer had been working in California for the last seven years, when he decided to move back to Canada, settle down, and purchase an apartment.

Zou managed to gather an impressive amount of $422,000 in savings, throughout his time in the U.S. However, due to high conversion rates and fees involved in transferring his funds to Canada, Zou opted to convert his funds to crypto, deposited to QuadrigaCX, converted it to Canadian dollars, and filed a withdrawal request in October 2018.

‘I wasn’t using it for trading. I just wanted to move my money over to my Canadian bank account’, Zou said.

After four months, the QuadrigaCX saga made it apparent that he had lost all of his life savings.

‘What I didn’t know was that my withdrawal would be pending or incomplete and it never got deposited in my bank account. I’ve been waiting four months so far.’

‘I was going to use that money for a deposit on an apartment, but now I can’t do that anymore. And now I’m currently searching for a job, so it’s kind of a bad time for me.’

He conluded the interview by saying that he ‘just got caught up in this at the wrong time.’

Chepicap recently reported that the Ontario Securities Commission ‘The Canadian SEC’, will be looking into the whole affair to see if anything is to be done.

However the OSC did not call this a formal investigation, but they did say in a statement that given the potential harm to Ontario investors, they are looking into this matter and have already been in contact with the monitor.

Hopefully the OSC will find a way to rectify the situation, but it doesn’t look likely that they will. For now the entire QuadrigaCX debacle is playing out as a painful theatre play.

As always, stick with Chepicap for all updates on this Canadian saga!

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