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The Current Transcript for July 20, 2021

Host: Robyn Bresnahan

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Your position isn't to protect you if your minister, prime minister, guess what? Your are most. Your Supreme Court justice. If you're an ordinary person, guess what? You are on list too. All you can do is come to the attention of somebody who'd want to pay one of these companies to break into your phone.

ROBYN BRESNAHAN: journalists and over 20 different countries, opposition politicians, human rights activists, all people reported to have been spied on through their phones with an Israeli developed malware programme called Pegasus. We'll tell you how it works, who's being targeted and what the wider implications are for you. Then.

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Thanks to the pandemic, the genie is out of the bottle. There's no going back. If you're going to force your remote engineering team to come back into the office. I don't think they're going to stick around because they have options they've never had before.

RB: If the pandemic has taught us one thing is that working from home is indeed possible in many cases. But some employers continue to insist on a return to the office. And that's not sitting well with employees who saved hours a day by not commuting a conversation with two people who've changed careers. And finally this morning will return to Cryptoland, continuing with Episode five of the CBC podcast that explores the mysterious death of Canadian cryptocurrency CEO Gerald Cotten. But first, we start with Pegasus and the phones. It's infiltrated. Good morning. I'm Robyn Bresnahan and you're listening to The Current.

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Investigation alleges Pegasus spyware used to target politicians, activists and journalists around the world

Guests: Carine Kanimba, Ron Deibert, Agnes Callamard

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You can access every message you ever sent, it can access every message you've ever received. You can access every photo, every video, every email. It can turn on your microphone, turn on your camera. You can record what's on on your screen. You can access your GPS, it can monitor your location, and it can do all of this without you ever knowing, any idea that you had this aspect of your life could be kept private and on the mobile phone of your own.

RB: Well, that sounds rather alarming. That was reporter David Pegg of The Guardian newspaper talking about the tentacles of the spyware programme called Pegasus. The programme was developed by an Israeli company called the NSO Group and has been sold to governments around the world. And now an investigation by a global team of journalists and non-governmental organisations has revealed that Pegasus was used to target a huge variety of prominent people. Some were heads of state, some opposition politicians. There were investigative journalists, human rights lawyers, activists, political dissidents. Coming up, we'll speak to one of the people targeted by this software. But first, Agnes Callamard is the secretary general of Amnesty International, which took part in the investigation, which is being called the Pegasus Project. Good morning.

AGNES CALLAMARD: Good morning.

RB: What is the major takeaway from this investigation in your eyes?

AGNES CALLAMARD: The first take away is that any claims by and so that the spyware is only used to counter terrorism and target criminals is blown away. The evidence provided by this, frankly, bombshell investigation proves that spyware is used in an extensive and if not systematic global way to target all of the individuals that you mention journalists, human rights defenders, politicians of your position and indeed even France. That is a major take away. We are not safe. There is a weapon out there that is unregulated and that can go after everyone.

RB: Can you give us a couple of examples of some of the prominent individuals which have been targeted?

AGNES CALLAMARD: The first, of course, all journalists. So we are this gentleman I I've found that 180 journalist in two dozen countries are being targeted. That includes Cecilio Pineda in Mexico, who was in fact killed, murdered a few days after his phone was compromised. That includes some 40 Tonalist from almost every major outlet in India that were also targeted and therefore were infected. We also know that people from the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, the editor of the Financial Times, all of them were targeted and their phone compromised. In addition to the journalist, they are human rights defenders that have been targeted, politicians in in India, politician of the opposition have been targeted, leading some of the major media outlets to take cover to speak of a Watergate moment for India. So- and it's we're only day two of the project. So please keep the programme on because there will be more revelations.

RB: Well, the NSO Group, which makes Pegasus has said that they sell this software to vetted governments for the purposes of fighting crime and terrorism. It says the list of numbers has not come from its database. Why do you believe otherwise?

AGNES CALLAMARD: Now we do not believe otherwise. We have not commented on on the data itself to protect potential sources. What we do know is that those lists, the list of 50000 phone numbers, is a list of persons of interest thrown by the client of NSO. What we do know is that when we zoom in on some of those persons of interest, when we do find access to their phone, as amnesty has done, we find that in many cases their phone have been compromised on on around the time that they were listed as a person of interest. So unless you can say whatever they want, that list is a list of potential targets. And many of them have actually become real targets. Their phone have been compromised. The ones that have not been useful have not been compromised, it is either because we will not able to find the spyware, which is very difficult to track down, or because the phone was also shut down.

RB: Prior to joining Amnesty International, you led an independent U.N. investigation into the killing of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. What evidence has emerged in this in. Investigation about Mr. Khashoggi's relatives.

AGNES CALLAMARD: Well, the fiance of Jamal, was targeted four days after the killing, the murder of Jamal, at a time when she was in the height of fears and grief, her phone was targeted. The home of Mr. Khashoggi's his wife was targeted. We also found that the phone of the Turkish prosecutor was targeted to demonstrating that these spyware is also used to compromise the course of justice. It is a threat to fair trial. It is a threat, of course, to a range of human rights activists, to democratic principles.

RB: Do you know whether your phone number was on that list of 50000 members?

AGNES CALLAMARD: My phone number was not on the list and my phone number was not on my phone would be assessed. They were not compromised. If I may, then maybe, you know, given the gravity of what is being unravelled and and more will be made public in the near future, it is incumbent upon the international community to regulate that industry. It is completely out of control. It's so far west, no one is safe. And it is a fight, frankly, to peace and security because some of those people are targeted outside their countries. In other words, there is evidence of Morocco targeting journalists who are resident and [unintelligible]. This is very broad. Here we are talking about a major threat to international law and frankly, to international relations. It is incumbent upon the international community to place a moratorium on the sale of the Pegasus spyware and of any kind of related intelligence. And NSO must take all steps now to shut down the system of those countries that have used spyware to attack human rights defenders.

RB: OK, Agnes, it was good to talk to you this morning. Thank you for your time.

AGNES CALLAMARD: Thank you very much.

RB: That was Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, which took part in the Pegasus Project investigation. A Canadian research group has been watching Israel's NSO group for years. Citizen Lab is based at the University of Toronto. It studies things that affect our digital freedoms, such as surveillance tools and online filters. And in 2016, it published its first report about NSO and Pegasus. It was also asked to review this most recent investigation. Ron Deibert is the director of Citizen Lab. He's also a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Ron, good morning.

RON DEIBERT: Thanks for having me here.

RB: Robin, thank you for being with us. Citizen Lab has been researching NSA for years. Was there anything in this new investigation that surprised you?

RON DEIBERT: I wouldn't say there wasn't anything there was something in this investigation that surprised me, per say, it's just a lot more of what we've been tracking over the last five or six years. This is a company, as Onya said, that sells to government clients in, frankly, a really frivolous way. It just doesn't really have any regard for how those clients might abuse their spyware. And so what we've documented is really a mountain of evidence over over the last five years of targeting of journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, even academics. So this, you know, really explodes. That case amplifies it in a number of different directions.

RB: What is it about the spyware that makes it so invasive?

RON DEIBERT: Well, I mean, you know, first of all, think about our everyday use of that little device in your pocket. We carry it around with us at all times. It's even with us when we sleep. It's a window into our personal lives. This type of technology is very sophisticated. The latest version of the spyware that we have discovered involves no interaction on the part of the target. So there's no attachment that has malware on it that you have to trick a user into clicking on. They can simply locate a phone number, which is what that reconnaissance list is about, identify a person's phone number and then send a malformed message and simply take it over. So this allows the government operator to have a window into a person's life to to look back at them through their screen, to see everything that they're doing, to turn on the camera, the microphone, to read every email, every SMS message to track their location when you think about that last capability and then reflect on the fact that a number of targets and and associates of targets who we have confirmed have had their devices hacked with this type of spyware have then turned up murdered. So the consequences here are profoundly invasive and powerful.

RB: Who do you think bears the most responsibility for this? Would it be the NSO group who created this spyware or would it be the governments that are using this? I mean, is it a bit like making weapons and the argument that the makers can't prevent it from falling into the wrong hands?

RON DEIBERT: Well, you know, I really don't think that argument holds water any longer. I don't think companies in this day and age can say, hey, we we simply make this product. We're not responsible for how it's used. And frankly, you know, NSO is being disingenuous when they say they have no idea how their government clients use it. If we at the citizen lab can track this company and their clients with such precision that, you know, on frankly, on any given day, we have a pretty good picture of who the government clients are. I'm sure a sophisticated surveillance company can do the same with its own products. So the responsibility does rest on the shoulders of companies that are, you know, guiding principles at the U.N. that require companies to do human rights due diligence. It also rests on governments, of course, though. So, you know, the open secret here is that every government in the world has a stake in this industry. They are all, frankly, addicted to this type of cyber espionage. Even our own government here in Canada has a very well resourced foreign espionage agency that's legally authorised to hack into phones abroad, probably not doing the type of thing that we're talking about on this programme today, at least, I hope. But it's it's an industry that governments and companies benefit from having kept secret. They like it in the shadows. So contracts have all sorts of non-disclosure agreements and the industry is entirely opaque, which is why the research that we've been doing and groups like Amnesty International have been doing is very important because we're shedding light on what is frankly, I agree entirely with and this is the most serious international security issue at the moment.

RB: And Ron, for people who might be listening and thinking, yes, but my government wouldn't spy on me. I'm not affected by this. What do you think of the wider implications?

RON DEIBERT: Well, one thing I'll say is we have seen a pattern where, you know, you'll have a target, let's say it's a journalist and the operators will routinely go after the devices of target's friends, family members, even children. The other part of it is, you know, these are the people behind this are not nice people right there. They're autocrats, despots, dictators. They don't care whether someone who is innocent has nothing to hide, so to speak. They thrive by abusing power and undermining accountability, going after people who are just doing their jobs. We have the citizen lab have been targeted. Journalists have been targeted. Human rights defenders have been targeted. So really, no one is immune from this type of threat.

RB: Ron, thank you for your time this morning. Good to talk to you.

RON DEIBERT: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

RB: That's Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. One of the people believed to be targeted by the spyware is Carine Kanimba. She is the daughter of Paul Rusesabagina. His story was the inspiration for the film Hotel Rwanda. He was the manager of that hotel in real life, and he is a fierce critic of the Rwandan government and its president, Paul Kagame. And last year he was arrested. Karine has been leading the campaign for his release. She is a dual American Belgian citizen and she joins us on the line from Brussels. Carine, good morning.

CARINE KANIMBA: Good morning, Robyn.

RB: Before we get into your phone being hacked, can you just remind us, how did your father end up in jail and what is he accused of?

CARINE KANIMBA: Yes, so my father wasn't legally arrested last year. He was actually kidnapped last August while travelling through Dubai on his way to Peru, and he was kidnapped by the Rwandan government and brought to Rwanda forcefully tortured for three for three days. Then he's been denied his chosen attorneys and held in solitary confinement for more than two hundred and sixty days in violation of the Nelson Mandela rules. He's being accused on false charges of terrorism. They're completely invented charges made up by the Rwandan government and the president of Rwanda himself, who has gone after my father and tried to silence him for many years for his advocacy on human rights. And and him exposing the human rights abuses being perpetrated by the Rwandan government.

RB: What have you been doing over the last year to try to secure your father's release?

CARINE KANIMBA: I've been rallying the support of many government officials, Belgian members of parliament, U.S. congressmen, European members of Parliament, British UK House of Lords, as well as communicating extensively with them with the Ministry of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, actually had a meeting with the Belgian minister of Foreign Affairs in June that the pact that the forensics team discovered that the Pegasus software had been activated throughout the duration of that confidential meeting. So I'm not the only one who has been spied on. My family and our legal team are not the only victims of this. The other government officials that I have been exchanging extensively with rallying their support for my father's release over the past eight months are essentially victims of this of this espionage as well.

RB: But, Carine, how did you react when you found out that your phone had been targeted?

CARINE KANIMBA: Well, I wasn't shocked because I know that this government, the Rwandan government has gone after my father for many years, after our family. There has been assassination attempts. They've broken into our home. They've they've tried to intimidate him and us at different events, conferences or even on social media. So it wasn't shocking to me that they would go if they can go to the extent of killing and trying to assassinate someone there, they have no problem invading somebody's privacy and following my interactions. So I wasn't shocked. I was mostly saddened by the people who I know are are also have been targeted by this government and we don't want their information to be known. Then clearly, the Rwandan government has been able to access their information through to me, through my phone, but also for my father, especially my father's release, our team, our legal team. I communicate extensively with our entire legal team, which is a team, an international team of lawyers that work together to try to secure my father's release and our family. And so these interactions have been compromised, our calls and emails. And so our legal strategy, it has been compromised. And that means my father can have no fair trial in addition to having been kidnapped and tortured in Rwanda.

RB: So do you assume at this point that you're being listened to, followed all the time?

CARINE KANIMBA: I do, I frankly do, and it's frightening to me, it's very scary. I don't think this this software should land in the hands of governments that are known especially I mean, actually, this is unregulated and the Rwandan government has no problem killing, has no problem harassing and intimidating and going after human rights advocates, critics, journalists. And we've seen this many times over the years. And so I mean, I know my phone can be listened to again, but I'm not I'm not frightened. I think we have to continue the efforts to get my father home before they can hurt him any more than they already have.

RB: When was the last time you talked to your father?

CARINE KANIMBA: I spoke with him last Friday. We have about five minute calls with him every Friday from the prison. Those calls are monitored. He doesn't speak at ease. He sounds like he's he's tense and he's actually very ill. He has bad back problems. He is old. He's sixty seven years old. And he's a cancer survivor, has hypertension. So he's not well. And then and so when we do communicate with him, I'm very thankful for those few minutes. But it brings more alarm to to what we're doing and need the help that we need to get everyone to demand his immediate release from the Rwandan government.

RB: Do you think you'll ever see him again?

CARINE KANIMBA: Yes, I believe so, because every day things like this, the Rwandan government is exposed for the crimes they're committing, for the human rights abuses they're committing, and they have led a misinformation campaign. They've hired hundreds of thousands of trolls to go after anyone who speaks positively of my father on any platform. And something like this exposes the way the Rwandan government goes about silencing its critics. And so the truth will come out. And we've said this from the beginning. And I think because my father's not only innocent, his rights have been violated, but he's also not just anyone. He has saved over one thousand two hundred sixty eight people during the Rwandan genocide. And so I believe that the world I believe in humanity. I believe that the world will continue, will rally behind us and help us get him home. And I know that he's strong enough. He's emotionally a very strong individual, and I hope that he continues to hold on until we're able to get him out of that.

RB: Carine, thank you for your time today. That was Carine Kanimba. She is the daughter of the Rwandan activist Paul Rusesabagina, who was depicted in the film Hotel Rwanda. Well, the CBC News is coming up next. And then.

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Thirty years of working in H.R. and I have never seen a workplace transition like this, not even close all the way across the country, across all industries, all different demographics.

RB: In six minutes, we'll be meeting two people who jumped ship from their pre pandemic jobs and taken on more satisfying careers. I'm Robyn Bresnahan. You're listening to The Current.

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Pandemic prompts Canadians to make a bold career move — a resignation

Guests: Matt McGuire, Debby Carreau

RB: Hello, I'm Robyn Bresnahan, and you're listening to The Current.

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RB: Still to come in, the search for a quarter of a billion dollars gone missing, the shady practises of cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX become clearer in Episode five of A Death in Cryptoland. But first, what it's like to quit your job during a pandemic.

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RB: I quit, those are two words managers are hearing a lot of these days, it's being called the great resignation, spurred on by all the change that came with the pandemic. The communications firm Navigator found that 42 percent of the 1500 Canadians they surveyed said they are considering changing jobs or careers this year. This as job postings are up 20 percent from pre pandemic levels, according to RBC. Matt McGuire is one of those who's left his job. He joins us from Markham, Ontario. Good morning, Matt.

MATT MCGUIRE: Good morning. How are you?

RB: I'm OK, thank you. Tell us, before you decided to make a change, what was your job for nearly 20 years?

MATT MCGUIRE: So I've been a software engineer for as long as I can remember. I had my first job as a programmer in high school, actually, and it's something that I have always loved since I was a kid, and it's something I continue to love to this day.

RB: But you do have a fairly new job. What is that?

MATT MCGUIRE: I did so I've been able to secure a position as a software architect. And the difference is really the architect sort of defines the the architecture, the infrastructure, the layout of the system and the technologies and all of the enterprise software that a company needs to run its business, whereas the development team implements that solution. So each developer would have responsibility to a specific piece of that that they're tasked with developing. And the architect has responsibility for the entire project.

RB: Would it be fair to say that, for those people who aren't so familiar with your line of work, that a software architect is a bit of a step up, an upgrade from a software developer?

MATT MCGUIRE: Some might argue that it isn't a step up because of the increased responsibilities and the working hours, but I think it certainly is a step up and you really have to consider things that a developer wouldn't necessarily have to consider.

RB: And you had to work hard for this new designation. I think you had to write fifteen exams to be certified, is that right?

MATT MCGUIRE: Well, I failed three, so I actually wrote 18 of them. But yeah. So the way this all happened is when the pandemic hit, we were given work from home orders and at the time I lived in North York, this saved me two and a half hours of commuting every day down to Union Station. And when it became clear that this was going to last a while, I decided to reinvest that time in furthering my education. The way I did that was studying for and writing certification exams.

RB: So you were saving all this time on your regular commute because you were working from home. But what else motivated this change?

MATT MCGUIRE: I would say that I wasn't really looking for a new position and it was kind of a situation where the stars aligned. I was starting to get more and more attention on LinkedIn with each new certification I received. And it was a great company. I loved my manager. I loved management. And there was an individual at the office who was a peer of mine who was not the most pleasant person to work with. And I think that that is something that most of your listeners can relate to. And later in October or November, I got a message on LinkedIn. It was a gentleman in Chicago, and he had presented me a job description that was pretty much everything I wanted in my next role.

RB: Aside from this one individual who it sounds like made the workplace fairly toxic for you, I understand there was also the working from home, but that you were enjoying working from home. But yet your bosses at your old job were kind of insisting that people eventually come back to work. Why do you think that was?

MATT MCGUIRE: I think that a lot of employers are looking to bring their employees back to the office on what they're calling a hybrid model anywhere from three to five days a week. And here's what a lot of companies don't realise. Your engineers are being approached on LinkedIn every day. But what's different is now they're being approached by American companies or Canadian companies with remote positions. One hundred percent remote. In the case of American positions, it jobs tend to pay better in most American cities than the same job would earn anywhere in Canada, at least in my experience. And when we see employers talking about bringing staff back to the office three to five days a week, I don't think that's going to fly. We've had the Internet for a really long time. Employers never really caught on to the work from home model. And thanks to the pandemic, the genie is out of the bottle. There's no going back if you're going to force your remote engineering team to come back into the office, I don't think they're going to stick around because they have options they've never had before.

RB: You're now making more money, are you happier?

MATT MCGUIRE: I am, I am. It's not just because of the money. I've had a lot of changes in my life in the past two years. I'm a father now. Our son was born just before the start of a pandemic. So financial freedom allowed us to move into the suburbs. And we're renting a slightly larger house. No, certainly, even if I lived in the same place, just eliminating that two and a half hours a day commute on the TTC is enough to make me happier.

RB: Had it not been for the pandemic for all the time that you have saved on that commute, do you think that you would have jumped ship?

MATT MCGUIRE: No, I don't think so. Perhaps eventually, but I certainly was not looking. But when you think about it: twenty four hours a day, two and a half hours a day commute. I spent 10 percent of my life on the subway. And that's been given back to me now. And it's really that time that has given me the opportunity to reinvest in my education, to consider positions that weren't open before and to leave the city core and to, I guess, find a more comfortable place to live.

RB: Matt, thanks very much for sharing your story with us. All the best in your new job. And congratulations on becoming a dad.

MATT MCGUIRE: Thank you so much.

RB: That was Matt McGuire in Markham, Ontario. Debby Carreau has been listening into this conversation. She's the CEO and founder of Inspired HRR and Inspired Workplace, and she joins us this morning from Vancouver. Hello to you, Debby.

DEBBY CARREAU: Good morning, Robyn.

RB: What do you make of what you just heard from Matt?

DEBBY CARREAU: This story Matt told us is so familiar. In my 30 years of working in and sort of close proximity to that, I have never seen a workplace transition like this, not even close. So that story we're seeing play out all the way across the country, across all industries, all different demographics.

RB: What other kinds of stories are you hearing right now?

DEBBY CARREAU: There's five reasons. We're seeing that people are changing jobs and they really kind of they vary between the five. So the first one is there's a lot of friction, attention right now around the return to work, remote work versus returning to the workplace. Another one is is during the pandemic people have had a lot of time, time to reflect on how they spend their time, what's important to them, are they happy in their job and their career trajectory? Another one is health and safety. A lot of industries, people just aren't ready to go back and be around a lot of people. Yet the fourth one is happiness. We just generally see this malaise around people right now. People aren't as happy as they were two years ago. And as adults, really, we spend such a large portion of our time working. Often people attribute the lack of happiness to the workplace, rightfully or wrongfully. And the last one is, is job security. During the pandemic, a lot of people feel they were let down by their employers. So whether they were laid off, they had a salary freeze, the salary reduction. In many people, they were looking toward industries that are more secure, where they feel like if something like this happens again, they don't want to be laid off.

RB: Matt said, that had not been for the pandemic. He might not have made this career change. I mean, do you also hear the other side of that, that this is kind of a scary time to change careers, that maybe somebody is in a job that they don't love, but they're in a stable job and, you know, without, I guess, face to face meetings are starting to happen now. But, you know, for the longest time it was over. Zoome And it's kind of a scary time to look for a job.

DEBBY CARREAU: That's a really good question. And I would have said up until 90 days ago, 100 percent people were terrified about losing their job. We had the opposite problem. People weren't resigning when they were miserable or when they really should be resigning. They were hanging onto their jobs for dear life. In the last 90 days. And we've seen one hundred and eighty degrees shift. And I think people are just saying there's so many jobs out there. They're seeing their family members, their friends, their their peers on LinkedIn, changing jobs. And then there's all of a sudden this confidence that people seem to be throwing caution to the wind and trying something new.

RB: What are some examples of industries that are seeing pretty high rates of employee turnover right now?

DEBBY CARREAU: The biggest one that comes to mind for me is hospitality as restaurants and bars and hotels opened back up. Obviously, in those positions, whether when you're a front line worker, you're dealing with lots and lots of people. And the other piece is because every one of the industries that were the hardest hit had so many layoffs. And I think those two factors, the health and safety, one in the job security, are a huge driver for people to look at a different industry, unfortunately. So they have an acute shortage right now in the workplace. That's that's the big one. The other ones are more employers that are not flexible. So not necessarily an industry, but employers that are just assuming this as the pandemic comes to an end, life is going to go back to how it was two years ago. And as you heard from Matt and how the data shows, that's just not the. People do not expect to live their lives the way they did two years ago.

RB: I mean, we've heard that well, some people enjoy the working from home life. It does have its disadvantages as well. Example, people tend to be working longer hours. I was thinking, well, Matt has a newborn. I was thinking in the back of my mind, just wait until you have to home school and work at the same time. I mean, how much does this kind of employee burnout factor into this?

DEBBY CARREAU: I'm glad you brought this up because this one is so important. Unfortunately, employees, you kind of look at the data from remote work and they're saying, oh, my goodness, productivity is increased. This is amazing. But what they're not understanding is that level of productivity is not sustainable. Exactly what you said is we're not having these workplace boundaries. People, if they happen to be at home and they don't feel like talking to their spouse, their natural default is to go and start working again. People are available 24/7. And we're just hearing from so many people that they are getting burned. They're struggling with mental health issues. And a lot of it is attributed to workplaces that are putting those safe and secure boundaries around how to manage work in life.

RB: So what do you think that companies are going to have to do? I mean, as someone who works in H.R., do you see this as an opportunity for companies to become more flexible, to say, OK, well, hey, Matt, maybe, you know, you want to work from home full time, but, you know, your colleague Joline wants to work a hybrid model. So we're going to work around or do you think that at some point the companies are just going to have to say, sorry, we can't accommodate all of you and your different requests and we are going to have to go back to some kind of normality?

DEBBY CARREAU: You're asking such a good question and this is a loaded question right now. So, first of all, I'll sort of give you the ballpark data. So when you look at the population of Canada and you ask people if they want to return to work, about 20 percent of people are saying, I want to go back into the work full time. About 50 percent want a hybrid model and about 30 percent want to work from home. Full stop. No to back into an office at all. So to your point, it's really hard to meet the needs of everyone. However, in many employers. OK, that's great. Let's give everyone flexibility and we'll live happily ever after with both from a productivity stand and more importantly, from a diversity equity inclusion side. This could pose some problems. And I'll tell you what it means. The data is starting to show the people that work at home versus working in the workplace are 10 percent less likely to get promoted. The data also shows us that women, visible minorities and people of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to tend to want to work from home and not go back to the office. So what this is going to do over time, if you give absolute flexibility, is we're going to see a larger divide again as it relates to equity seeking groups wanting parity in the workplace. So it could be a real problem if employers just say everyone do what they want.

RB: Yeah. What do you see as being the solution?

DEBBY CARREAU: There is you need to talk to your to not just your workers, but also your supervisors and how they want work done. And however you bring people back into the workplace, it needs to be consistent. So you may say that, OK, we're going to go back into work, the workplace, 60 percent. Everyone's going to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or you can do it by teams instead of HR team works on Mondays, this team works Tuesdays. And you just make sure that you're doing the same thing for everyone. You can have flexibility within your framework. But to completely leave it up to chance, you're going to have a lot of unintended consequences down the road.

RB: I'm glad you brought up women and people of colour who have borne the brunt of pandemic job losses. And it's a good opportunity now to bring in another guest, Samanthea Samuels. She didn't lose her job, but she decided it was time to change careers. Samantha, used to work as a corporate lawyer. Now she is pursuing her passion for diversity and inclusion and will bring her into the conversation. Now she's in Toronto. Hi, Samanthea.

SAMATHEA SAMUELS: Hi, Robyn. How are you?

RB: Very well. Can you share some of your story with us? How did the pandemic motivate you to pursue a career change?

SAMATHEA SAMUELS: So they made a bit of a career change in the past few months, actually left my previous firm in April of this year right around my birthday, because I've been thinking about it for some time. And as you mentioned, now I'm the national manager of Equity Diversity and Inclusion Board in matters of a blog, which is the biggest corporate law firm in Canada, if I'm still on the street. But I I'd say that several factors played into my decision to switch from private practise. The main factor being that I'm just more passionate about the work that I do now. And this passion is actually something that I'd say stemmed from necessity. So as a black woman, I've often had to do this type of equity, seeking work and combating institutional barriers to create safe spaces. My community and those who look like me, I heard you speaking with Debby about burnout, and that was another factor.

RB: I wanted to ask you about that, Samanthea, because, I mean, it's fantastic. You have found a job that you were really passionate about and that you really believe in. But part part of it was, you know, that you were working extremely long hours as a corporate lawyer. How long?

SAMATHEA SAMUELS: That depends. I'd say and on average, for me, during the really busy time, that my days would range from like 12 to 15, sometimes 17 hours. I think I pulled a few all nighters during the pandemic. And I know that there is a common expression that rather than work from home, it's more like living at work. And it certainly feels that way at times. But I'd say that my burnout was more a result of many factors and not just the timing, because a very demanding legal career is just something that you sign up for, especially. In my opinion, as a [unintelligible] lawyer. But I think coupled with living through a global pandemic and the repercussions of that, and unfortunately, my family, like countless others, has suffered loss due to covid so that along with living in lockdown and seeing constant images and stories of black, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ plus, people being targeted and murdered, oppressed, all of these things combined contributed to me feeling burned out and really just wanting to take a big vacation, which is not something that we've been able to do. And I think another reason and factor in my decision to switch careers, I think came down to timing. And that played a significant role because we're just we're living in a time now where you just can't deny that racism exists. And thankfully so, because for many years I've just been very confused and frankly upset a bit about the post-racial and colour-blind framework that we try to convince ourselves that we lived in. But I think that in the stillness of this time and being confined to our homes, that kind of in a way forced us to sit with and reckon with some of the injustices. And that's opened a lot of people's eyes to issues of racism.

RB: Samantha, what has been the biggest change that you've noticed in your life since making this change?

SAMATHEA SAMUELS: For me personally, just absolutely loving my job. And that, again, ties us back into the passion and the work that I do now and the importance and necessity of it. It just feels like it's just very aligned with who I am, where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing in this moment. And my work is completely different. It's a bit of a 180 when you go from private and public corporate deals and then into this role where I'm working more with people and changing systems and creating inclusive spaces for members of an organisation and the firm to all feel comfortable bringing their true selves to work.

RB: Well, congratulations on following your passion. It sounds like really meaningful work that you're doing. Thank you, Samanthea. That was Samanthea Samuel. She's a former corporate lawyer. She's now a diversity and inclusion manager. And back to Debby Carreau, who's been listening to Samantha talk about that. And it's quite striking, Debby, that, you know, she's found her passion and she is not as burnt out. She has a better work life balance. How do you think that managers can do a better job at providing that for their employees?

DEBBY CARREAU: So, first of all, I just want to acknowledge that I think her story is a real success story. And I'm always so happy to hear that when people can align not just work life balance, but their passion and their ability to still earn an income and make a difference in society in regards to managers, what they can do, the first one is flexibility is where we can provide flexibility to our people. I think that one's really important. So whether it's the where you work, how you work, if you need to leave work or turn off your computer for a couple hours to go pick your child up from school or go for a workout because it's going to make you better at work, I think that's a really important one. A big one right now is mental health support, making sure as an organisation we care about not just the worker, but the whole person that's dedicating their career to our organisations. And psychological safety is really sort of spurred these days to make sure that people do feel secure in their position. One of the ones that employers don't do, but is the best thing you can do right now is don't wait until people quit and do an exit interview, do a stay interview, find your great people right now and ask them why do they continue to work here? What are the things that make them loyal to the organisation, to their supervisor, to their peers? Because asking people that simple question can give you so much information on what steps to take next. And the last one isn't something that's going a little bit is make sure your people are taking their. But that burnout is a real factor, but also just not taking vacation is the wrong thing to do, and it's the employer's responsibility to make sure people are taking those breaks. Let's get some people some time off because they're going to be more refreshed and more productive.

RB: Debby, how much should people rely on their employers to really care about them, to take care of them? I mean, I have heard countless stories during this pandemic, many from mostly from women who have gone to their H.R. manager or gone to their boss and said, I am struggling. I am feeling like I'm drowning, trying to do everything at home, at work, you know, and the response being, yes, I know. It's really hard. Take care of yourself and these women kind of screaming silently or not even they say, no, you take care of me. But I mean, what responsibility do employers have to accommodate their employees?

DEBBY CARREAU: Although there's so many different ways I can answer the question, but the biggest one I would encourage employers to think about now is everyone is looking for talent. And if you're not taking care of your employees, there's someone else out there who will. So not only is it the right thing to do, it's a smart business decision to do legally. The question's a little bit different. Obviously, we need to provide a work environment that's free from bullying, harassment, all forms of maltreatment. We don't want a toxic work environment. We have a duty to accommodate if people have got any struggles that they're facing or they have something as it relates to any of the prohibitive grounds on the human rights side of things. And some mental health situations definitely follow that as well as other health factors, too. But I really think the big one comes back to is if you want to have the best people today, you have to take care of them because there's so many great employers here in Canada that are willing to take care of your team and be happy to take them.

RB: You still happy in your job, Debby? Are you thinking about a change?

DEBBY CARREAU: I own the company, so if I need a change, that's a much bigger problem. I love the whole people business. I mean, it's been a really crazy sort of 18 months here, sort of working alongside businesses with whether it's layoffs and the rehiring or no significant recruitment, helping people to mental health issues. Some of the health and safety around covid. Never a dull day. And we're actually seeing so many organisations now have recognised how important it is to have those skills. And companies that have never thought about hiring a person in H.R. or team now are seriously considering it, either in-house or in an outsourced capacity.

RB: Great to talk to you this morning, Debby. Thank you so much.

DEBBY CARREAU: Likewise. Thanks for having me, Robyn.

RB: OK, bye bye. Debby Carreau is the founder and CEO of Inspired HRR and Inspired Workplace in Vancouver. We would love to hear from you on this. Have you switched jobs or even careers during the pandemic? What was the final straw? How did it feel to resign and what has the result been like so far? Perhaps you have some advice for would be career changers. What's one thing you wish someone had told you before you left? Your stories, your comments? Very welcome. You can send an email to thecurrent@cbc.ca Or you can head over to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can click on the contact link. Well, coming up after your regional update on the trail of hundreds of millions of dollars gone missing, Episode five of A Death in Cryptoland uncovers some shady business practises at Cryptocurrency Exchange Quadriga CX long before the death of its founder. I'm Robyn Bresnahan and you are listening to The Current.

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Episode 5 of A Death in Cryptoland

RB: Hello, I'm Robyn Bresnahan, and you're listening to The Current. This summer, we're bringing you a few of the best CBC original podcasts. We've started with A Death in Cryptoland. This is the story of what happened to Gerald Cotten and his cryptocurrency exchange. Quadriga CX. The young Canadian CEO was declared dead while on his honeymoon in India in December 2018. And with that, more than a quarter billion dollars of customers funds left in limbo, leaving questions and theories about what really happened to him. Gerald Cotten's business partner was Michael Patrón. Chapter five looks at his story and the online rumours about a criminal past under the name Omar Dhanani. Here's a death in crypto land with host Takara small.

SOUNDCLIP

TAKARA SMALL: I think the idea of giving your identifying information to a company that was co started by a guy who's been accused of being involved in a large scheme of identity theft is concerning. There were entire flow charts on Reddit from some individuals who had gone to great lengths to attempt to prove that Michael Patrón was actually Omar Dhanani. And creditors want photo evidence.

ALEXANDER PISARSKI: The best way to verify if Michael Patron is Omar Dhanani would be a mug shot, there must be one of Omar detainees somewhere. Can anyone track one down?

TAKARA SMALL: At that moment, that's exactly what the Globe and Mail reporters Alexander Pisarski and her colleague Joe Castaldo are trying to do to put an end to the speculation one way or the other.

JOE CASTALDO: That's that's one way to show it's the same person. But as a as a journalist, you're always second guessing and like, you know, triple and quadruple checking things. You want to get it right.

TAKARA SMALL: We wanted to find out more about who Omar Janani was, so we tracked down some former classmates.

ANDY: We became acquaintances because we were both kind of nerds, I guess.

TAKARA SMALL: This is Andy. He lives in Huntington Beach, California. He went to school with Omar Dhanani. That's why when he was at work one day going down rabbit holes on Reddit, rumours about Omar jumped out at him.

ANDY: And the instant I fell across that Omar Dhanani I knew that kid in fifth grade. It blew my mind.

TAKARA SMALL: It brought back a lot of memories for him.

ANDY: It all started for sure in 1995 and 1996 when the Internet started coming out and Omar embraced it. But he embraced it in dark ways.

TAKARA SMALL: Andy remembers the first day Omar showed up at their elementary school.

ANDY: And his dad walked across the blacktop towards the main office. And they stuck out to me because they were both dressed in suits. I was like, you know, who are those people?

TAKARA SMALL: At first they hung out.

ANDY: When he came to my house, they were playing on my computer. And I couldn't find a computer game that I wanted to play, it was driving me nuts and I ended up looking in his bag and I found my game a bunch of games of mine in his bag. And I found also all my Xmen cards in hand. I emphasise the Xmen cards because those are my pride and joy that I had, like the full set and my full set of excellent cards was sitting in his bag with all my computer games. And I'm just like, Omar, what's all my stuff going in your bag? So I'm sorry. And ever since then, you know, I didn't want to hang out with that guy. It's funny because I'm 37 now. So how am I still bitter about Xmen cards from sixth grade? But I don't know. I just really liked those excellent cards.

TAKARA SMALL: Omar Dhanani got a reputation as a troublemaker, a distinction he'd carry with him into high school. He got a job in the school cafeteria working the food cart. According to a number of people we've talked to, Omar was running a scheme where for some of his pals, he would dole out too many burritos and too much change.

ANDY: What Omar would do if he was honest would give the kid his burrito and two dollars and fifty cents a change. But instead, Omar would give the kid like two or three burritos and 20, 30, or sometimes they would get really greedy and 40 bucks or 50 or 60 bucks.

TAKARA SMALL: Those who were in on it, his buddies would then kick back some of the money to Omar, splitting the proceeds. As you can imagine, the ploy didn't last very long. There are various stories about how things went off the rails, whether Omar quit before getting caught or whether he was fired. But the scam itself, people seem to agree on. Former classmates also tell us Omar became well known as a hacker and Andy remembers Omar using the handle Patrick. Omar ended up at another high school, but one time he came back for a visit.

ANDY: Me and my buddies were hanging out one day after school and Omar comes rolling up. I don't remember the exact car. A lot of it was like a Mazzaratti, but it was like the nicest sports car I had ever seen in my life with my own eyes. And and Omar is dressed to the nines like a gangster and like, oh, my gosh. But I feel like he's just a kid. I know I don't see him as good or bad. I just see in this kind of an innocent kid that is headed down the wrong road,

TAKARA SMALL: a road which would lead Omar to graduate from stealing lunch money to laundering cash.

BRETT JOHNSON: Now, the people out there in podcast land who have been listening already know the you know.

TAKARA SMALL: This is a podcast that's produced by a guy who has a sizeable prison record.

BRETT JOHNSON: Welcome to the first episode of Anglerfish, where we examine the darkest corners of our online lives. I'm your host, Brett Johnson. The United States Secret Service called me the original Internet godfather.

TAKARA SMALL: He loves saying that that Brad's been convicted of dozens of felonies.

BRETT JOHNSON: I built the first organised cybercrime community. It was called Shadow Crew.

TAKARA SMALL: Shadow Crew was that cyber marketplace which serviced the underworld, the one Albert Gonzalez had been part of, the guy in the wig who was busted at the ATM machine. It was an eBay for criminals. It began in 2002 during the pioneering days of Internet fraud. When my producers and I talk with Brett on a video chat, he's got closely cropped hair and a goatee. He's straight out of central casting for a bad guy in a TV movie of the week.

PRODUCER: Hi, Brett.

TAKARA SMALL: Hello, Brett.

BRETT JOHNSON: How are you?

TAKARA SMALL: Brett seems to love a captive audience. His alias back on Shadow Crew was Gollum fun. He tells us how he came up with it.

BRETT JOHNSON: So I went to university, I went to Duke and I went for English lit. And I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fans. So when it came time to come up with a screen name, I really liked the character Gollum. I love that little guy. So I was like, Gollum, Gollum, Lord, it can't just be Gollum. So it became Gollum fun.

TAKARA SMALL: Today, he bills himself as a cyber criminal, turned good guy, a consultant, but back then, the way Brett describes it, he was like the CEO of a vast enterprise, always on the lookout for decent talent, a.k.a. reliable bad guys.

BRETT JOHNSON: There's three necessities to committing successful cyber crime. Those three necessities are gathering the data, committing the crime and then cashing out. The cashing out aspect is the most important. And that's where Omar Dhanani comes in. So he was a money mule. OK, first and foremost,

TAKARA SMALL: by mule, he means someone who can help people launder their money. It was an important service, Brett says, because back then banks were getting good at identifying cash that was coming from illegal sources. So the crew had to be creative.

BRETT JOHNSON: We didn't have cryptocurrency in order to move massive amounts of value. All right. So I don't call cryptocurrency cash or currency because it's not especially Bitcoin. It's not. It's just a means to transfer value. All right. So we didn't have that back then. What? We had those we had E-Gold and then we had Liberty Reserve. E-Gold as a precursor to today's cryptocurrency. The only thing that ego lacked was the block chain. And for those who don't kow...

TAKARA SMALL: know no digital ledger, but otherwise E-Gold was similar in principle to Bitcoin. People could anonymously fund accounts with their national currency, which would then be converted to E-Gold. Was a virtual payment system, sort of like PayPal. Omar Dhanani, who went by Velour the French word for thief, began providing a pretty decent service.

BRETT JOHNSON: Bret says Omar began offering a debit card, a prepaid debit card. What he was doing was, is he would say, Send me your E-Gold. You would send Igoe. What say you sent five hundred dollars worth of E-Gold. You'd sent him five hundred dollars with E-Gold. He would charge maybe five, eight percent, and then he would put four hundred and fifty dollars US dollars onto the prepaid debit card so you could take it to an ATM and cash it out.

TAKARA SMALL: For criminals wanting to hide where their cash was coming from, Omar scheme was a popular one and he'd go on to become one of the leaders running shadow crew. But law enforcement would eventually catch up to Omar and his co-conspirators because though it was a sophisticated international criminal network, inevitably someone was bound to screw up. On a humid night in July 2003, a guy named Albert Gonzales arrives in an ATM in New York.

BRETT JOHNSON: He stayed at an ATM machine. He's taking a white plastic card, put it in an ATM machine, pulling out 20 dollar bills, taking the 20s, stuffing them into a backpack.

ALBERT GONZALES: 40 minutes at an ATM machine, 40 minutes. He stands there.

TAKARA SMALL: But what Albert doesn't realise is that he's inadvertently attracted the attention of a police officer, one who in all likelihood was thinking.

BRETT JOHNSON: What the hell is this kid doing?

TAKARA SMALL: But what really grabs the cop's attention is the get up Albert's wearing

BRETT JOHNSON: Albats wearing a wig. He's got a disguise on kid. What do you do? It Albert falls apart right there, gets arrested. Flip's goes to work for the Secret Service.

TAKARA SMALL: And that's how Operation Firewall began, the mission to take down Shadow Crew.

SECRET AGENT: Mr. Gonzales, he was a nice young man. I don't think that he viewed what he did as necessarily completely criminal.

TAKARA SMALL: This is one of the Secret Service agents. He was part of Operation Firewall. For his safety. We can't tell you who this agent is. He still works undercover.

SECRET AGENT: And so he sort of led us on a tour of of how the organisation worked and the things that were available to really any member of the general public. The scope of it was so massive in the number of credit card numbers, the amount of personally identifiable information and stolen payment card data that was out there was just tremendous.

TAKARA SMALL: Pretty quickly, they get Albert, [unintelligible] back online. So everything looks normal. But secretly, the agency takes over Shadow Crews website at first getting to know them by their aliases.

SECRET AGENT: So a couple of screen names that we started looking at. One was Jaiden and one was Velour. And this individual was well known for posting different sort of money laundering services on the federal website, trying to solicit business. His were very informational about how people basically can launder money and make it look more legitimate in a very sort of thoughtful, more academic manner.

TAKARA SMALL: Having infiltrated their ranks, the undercover agents interacted with valore who also went by Jaiden, they are waiting for him and the others to trip up that maybe they would log on, forgetting to hide their IP address, anything to reveal something about who they really were. In Omar's case, agents would come to see a pattern, he was using the name pattern in communicating with the bad guys. Then on October 26th of 2004, Albert Gonzales is apparently instructed by the Secret Service to trick the leadership of shadow crew into a chat room for a meeting and with everyone in front of their screens at the exact same time in places like the U.S., Britain, Poland and Canada. Law enforcement agencies moved in. It was a spectacular bust.

BRETT JOHNSON: One guy ends up jumping out of a out of a window onto a roof trying to get away. Of course they got him. One guy's got an ache. I think it was an AK47 that they ended up getting from that guy. Another guy is actually driving at that point. If you look at it. I mean, it's impressive as hell. It truly is. They did an outstanding job of trying to coordinate all these arrests at the same time.

TAKARA SMALL: 28 people were arrested internationally. Velour, or Omar was one of them. They trafficked one point five million stolen credit and bank card numbers on their website, shadowcrew.com.

SECRET AGENT: You know, we shut it down. One of our one of our folks put a little message out basically for to whoever went to the Web site would see that the takedown had occurred.

TAKARA SMALL: And not only that, reports at the time said the Secret Service even added the extra flourish of including the theme music from the show Mission Impossible.

SECRET AGENT: So we just posted a warning to the people committing fraud that the government wasn't going to sit back and let them continue doing it.

TAKARA SMALL: Brett wasn't grabbed in that sting, he says by then he'd left shadow crew, Omar was not as fortunate in 2005 on the day after his 22nd birthday. He pleaded guilty to his role in a conspiracy to commit credit card and identity theft. Omar was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was also given a 1000 dollar fine.

SECRET AGENT: And the folks that tend to do this tended to be in the younger side is, you know, let's say under 30 or under 35 and they didn't view it as as criminal. And a lot of them got fairly sentences that were lighter than what the guidelines would have would have prescribed back then. Whether that's result of society just hadn't come to grips with the problem of identity theft or some folks didn't view it as a real serious crime because it is sort of a paper crime, if you will. But it certainly set a precedent and showed how much money was out there and being made by these criminals and that this was the new way that everyone was going to get hit financially.

TAKARA SMALL: In May of 2007, Omar Dhanani gets out of prison, but he's not free of the legal system. The next month. Omar's back in court entering guilty pleas for a whole host of prior offences grand theft, money laundering, computer fraud, threatening extortion, drinking and driving part of a plea deal. We're told that would see Omar Dhanani deported to Canada. So by 2009, Omar is back in Canada. We know this because of a U.S. court filing that was made in the fall of that year, a petition to end efforts to get Omar to cough up the rest of that thousand dollar fine. He paid just 25 bucks. In Canada, Omar starts over again promoting digital currencies. He starts an exchange called Midas Gold under the name Omar Patrón. He'd officially changed his surname in Canada years earlier from his website mgold.com Omar Witsell Digital currencies for a business out of Costa Rica called Liberty Reserve. It offered the utmost in anonymity for its clients. There were layers of protection customers couldn't buy from Liberty Reserve directly. Here's Amy Castor, the freelance journalist in L.A.

AMY CASTOR: They have to go through these intermediaries called exchanges. So Midas Gold was an intermediary. They bought Liberty Reserve LR in bulk and then they would sell it to people for actual dollars. So you send Midas Gold dollars, your Fiat money, and they'll fund your Liberty Reserve account with LRs right. That you can then use to buy stolen identities, stolen credit card numbers, whatever you want on darknet markets.

NEWS CASTER: To Courtney Reagan Raw with some breaking news about U.S. authorities.

TAKARA SMALL: CNBC reported the takedown of Liberty Reserve.

NEWS CASTER: Could be the largest international money laundering prosecution in history. And charges are going to be announced any moment now in New York City.

TAKARA SMALL: And that dozens of websites were shuttered.

NEWS CASTER: For currency exchanges. And thirty five other websites that operate with Liberty Reserve have also been seised.

AMY CASTOR: Now, the main guy behind Liberty Reserve, Arthur Berdovsky, was arrested and he was charged with running a six billion dollar money laundering enterprise. Basically, the Liberty Reserve domain was seised. And the authorities also seised more than 30 domains registered as Liberty Reserve Exchangers, including mgold.com.

TAKARA SMALL: No one with Midas gold ever face charges, but the business was over. This was the spring of 2013. And. This Liberty Reserve case would catch the attention of kicks in in the months following Gerry's reported death. Remember, he's the customer turned sleuth who's been following the digital data trail left behind by Quadriga as co-founders. He requested the court documents from the US.

ALBERT GONZALES: There are a lot of documents that actually ended up being a few hundred dollars, but I'm glad I did because there's a lot of good stuff in there. You know, I was a little bit of a long shot going through that data, but I got a hit.

TAKARA SMALL: Buried in hundreds of pages of legal documents, he could see Midas Gold had been listed as one of the Exchangers for Liberty Reserve and that Omar Patrón was named, but then he made a striking discovery. The contact provided for dot com was Gerald Cotten, an email address. He was known to have used.

ALBERT GONZALES: At the modest gold account, was in Gerald Cotton's name and it was in Gerald Cotton's email address. It was his Gmail address. So, again, you've got this great data point that's been verified in court filings. And so the trial really starts to kind of unfurl from there for CUCs.

TAKARA SMALL: Isn't the suggestion that Michael Patrón was not the same man as Omar Janani was ludicrous. The revelation made him even more committed to his hunt for justice.

ALBERT GONZALES: Yeah, it did. It did become more about being being outraged. These guys were running around out there and just ripping people off and getting away with it. And I thought, well, I can do something here and I've got a lot of data and I'm going to put all this together and and put it out there and put it in the hands of law enforcement and see if it makes a difference.

TAKARA SMALL: So while QCA accent was carrying out his investigation, sharing his findings with police and reporters, Alexandra Posarski and Joe Castaldo from The Globe and Mail would continue their own hunt for answers. And as they wait for that mug shot of Omar Danani, they take stock of what they already knew.

ALEXANDER PISARSKI: So there were just a lot of really strange coincidences between Omar Janani in the US and Michael Patterson in Canada, for instance, they have the exact same birthday, November 16th, 1983. Omar Donati's dad. His name is Nazenin Michael Patterson, formed a company in Canada and one of the directors is named Anani, which was strange.

AMY CASTOR: And of course, there's always the possibility that there's more than one Omar patron or more than one Michael Patron or more than one Omar Dhanani out there. And so how do you prove that it's the same guy? You know, because it's a, it's a big thing to put out a story saying this guy's been hiding a criminal past for all of these years.

AMY CASTOR: Then the booking photo arrives from the New Jersey prison where Omar Dhanani had spent time. The mug shot is of a 22 year old Omar Dhanani. He has just a bit of facial hair, a patch of beard that barely covers the bottom of his chin. He's facing forward, but his dark brown eyes are looking off to the left. Alexander and Joe compare it to a screen grab of Michael Patron, the shape of the face, even the serious expression is similar in the Omar photo. The cheeks are fuller and in Michael's the beard is slightly more filled in.

AMY CASTOR: I mean, obviously, a lot of time passed between. The two photos are about 10 years apart.

ALEXANDER PISARSKI: And I do remember sitting in the newsroom with Alex and another editor, like studying these photos of Michael Patrón and Omar Dhanani. And one of the editors said, you know, look, there's there's a pockmark on his forehead, you know, and there's a pockmark on Michael Patterson's forehead. And for some reason, I thought that little tiny detail was like, OK, like we have it like we have all this information, we have these photos. It's clearly the same person.

TAKARA SMALL: So on the final day of February 2019, their story comes out, the headline reads, Quadriga co-founder served time in U.S. prison for a role in identity theft ring, documents reveal. Further proof would come later, the pair would obtain documents showing a second name change. This time, Omar Patrón would legally change his name to Michael Patrón.

AMY CASTOR: Liberty Reserve is shutdown in May 2013. That sort of puts Michael Patron out of business in terms of running that exchanger. But soon after that, he and and Gerald Khatun sort of meet up in Vancouver and they start going to Bitcoin meetings. So you can see the timeline here. May 2013, the we deserve a shutdown and then just months later, Quadriga is set up. And then it's launched in December 2013 and they're off and running.

TAKARA SMALL: Michael Patrón has only spoken with the media once since the collapse of Quadriga in twenty nineteen. Just after it was announced that Gerald Cotten was dead. He spoke to our colleague, Evet Brent. She asked him if he'd ever gone by the name or marginally.

MICHAEL PATRON: No, I have not.

EVET BRENT: So where did that even come from?

MICHAEL PATRON: Seems to have been a bunch of jumps and assumptions of last name and common contact. And coming up with this other person who was convicted of selling digital trail to other darknet 15 years ago and worked with the same person that I worked with and went by a nickname that's the same as my last name. So that seems to be the kind of connexion people are trying.

EVET BRENT: Right. So you have nothing to do with him. And it's basically just-

MICHAEL PATRON: You know, that enthusiasm that makes a good story. So I'm assuming that's why it became so popular, especially now when people are looking for someone to blame.

TAKARA SMALL: When Evet contacted him again for a podcast more than a year later, he finally acknowledged that he'd done time in a U.S. prison. He wrote, Having served a few months in a foreign country for a white collar crime 17 years ago, is generally considered to be an unfortunate part of your childhood that you suffered the consequences for not a lifelong badge of dishonour. For months now, we've been asking Michael Patrón to do a taped interview with us. He's turned us down. But in response to our questions about his childhood years, he denies everything: the burrito scam, the fancy car and the Xmen cards. Michael insists that his past isn't relevant to the story. But while he parted ways with the company in 2016, he was still a beneficial shareholder of Quadriga through his company, Crypto Consulting Group. Court documents say he held just over 18 percent of its shares. He says he's a victim in all this. He told us he's down hundreds of thousands of dollars. A final thing Michael wrote to us was, my involvement makes for a good story, but in reality, I was long gone before anything nefarious happened. For customers, this is of little consolation because as we'll discover something nefarious did happen at Quadriga CX and they were in the dark until it was too late and their money was all gone.

[Music]

RB: You've been listening to the CBC podcast, A Death in Crypto Land will pick up the story tomorrow with Episode six. That's all the time we have for The Current today. Q is coming up next on CBC Radio one. Alicia Vikander will be talking to Ali Hassan about her new movie, The Green Knight. I'm Robyn Bresnahan. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Tuesday July 20, 2021 Full Transcript

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