A Death In Cryptoland

What ever happened to some of the first girls to grow up – and blow up – on the internet?

In the late 2000s, YouTube gave rise to a new profession: kid-fluencer – kids making content for other kids, earning millions-strong audiences and massive paycheques. And for years, some of the most popular YouTube videos for girls lived on one channel: Seven Super Girls. It featured a rotating cast of tween and teen girls uploading sketches, skits and vlogs daily. Host Split Screen: There Goes My Childhood, Lauren White was one of them. Over time, they gained billions of views, big-name sponsors, lineups of screaming fans and more money than a child would know what to do with.

But with their growing success, came new rules from the man in charge: their manager. He began as a mentor, a kind of father figure. Then, he began dictating how the girls had to look, dress and behave. Above all, they had to look as young as they could for as long as they could. And for years, the girls did as he said… until he was put behind bars for hurting one of their own.

Almost a decade after the YouTube empire they built collapsed, the girls are now old enough to tell their own stories for the first time – the fame, the fortune, the friendships and the man they trusted for far too long.

About Split Screen: Welcome to Split Screen, an examination of the utterly captivating, sometimes unsettling world of entertainment and pop culture. From reality TV gone awry, to the cult of celebrity, each season of Split Screen takes listeners on an evocative journey inside the world of showbiz.

More episodes of There Goes My Childhood are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TGMCxCrypto

The revelation that Gerry’s house of cards had been falling apart — just as he’s reported dead in India — leaves people wondering: is this an exit scheme? Could Gerry still be alive? From buying a death certificate to Haitian zombie powder, people talk about the conspiracy theories. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764

As financial investigators struggle to find any of the missing quarter of a billion dollars, they begin to make some bizarre discoveries around how the exchange had operated — finding funny business from the very start.

For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764

Despite Michael Patryn’s denials that he’s a fraudster named Omar Dhanani, customers aren’t buying it. They’re demanding proof. A mugshot. A secret service agent, a felon-turned podcaster, and a childhood friend tell the story of Omar, the man Michael insists he’s not.

For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764

Gerald Cotten and his business partner, Michael Patryn, launch QuadrigaCX on Boxing Day, 2013. There’s hype in the budding Bitcoin community and the small exchange seems to have a meteoric rise. But cracks begin to appear, problems with the banks, a software bug, and delays in paying back customers. Meanwhile, online rumours of a criminal past dog Michael Patryn.

For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/a-death-in-cryptoland-transcripts-listen-1.6035764