Fraud, power, and technology under investigation.
A Death in Cryptoland sits in the sharp end of CBC’s investigative podcast world: scams, technology, violent subcultures, and systems that fail in public. Its episodes and featured series favor narrated reporting, archival texture, and interviews that turn strange cases into structural arguments.
PRESS PLAY
A Death in Cryptoland is a CBC true-crime and investigative podcast feed with fraud at its core and technology close behind. It is not built for loose banter. The recent episodes move with the tempo of reported documentary work, using narration, interviews, archival fragments, and clean scene-setting to make complicated scandals legible fast. The title points toward crypto crime, but the surrounding feed has become broader than one case. It carries stories about deepfake sexual exploitation, Elon Musk’s youth in apartheid South Africa, an unsolved homicide in Squamish, maritime lawlessness, the decline of the open internet, and undercover work inside violent extremist circles. That range can seem scattered at first. It is not. The common thread is power operating through systems most people only partly understand. Sometimes that system is a cryptocurrency exchange. Sometimes it is a platform, a school, a search engine, a ship, a climbing subculture, or an FBI infiltration. The storytelling keeps returning to the same question: what happens when clever people, weak rules, and public trust meet in the wrong place? The answer is rarely tidy. The show’s editorial posture is skeptical, grave, and quick to connect private behavior to public damage. It gives room to disturbing details, but it does not wallow in them. When an episode follows a con artist, an AI researcher, a journalist, or an undercover agent, the person matters because the structure around them matters too. That makes the feed a strong fit for listeners who like true crime with reporting muscle and a technology beat. It also rewards anyone drawn to stories where the apparent anomaly becomes a symptom. A strange death, a fake image, a broken platform, a hidden identity, a war chant at an elite school: each detail opens into something larger. The tone can be blunt. The appeal is its controlled momentum, its distrust of easy explanations, and its willingness to let a weird case become an indictment.
Made for: For listeners who want true crime with reporting depth, especially stories about scams, tech platforms, online abuse, extremist networks, and institutional failure. It suits people who prefer documentary structure over casual host chatter.
What sets it apart: The feed links individual cases to larger systems without losing narrative urgency. It treats fraud, violence, and tech harm as connected public stories, not isolated curiosities.
When the young CEO of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is reported to have died while honeymooning in India, it sets off a cataclysmic chain of events that would leave about 76,000 people out of a quarter of a billion dollars and a trail of conspiracy theories around whether Gerald Cotten is dead or alive. A Death in Cryptoland is an original podcast series about a crypto-tycoon, his secret past, his sudden demise, and an online sleuth’s obsession to unravel the truth behind QuadrigaCX. Hosted by Takara Small. For the best in true crime from CBC, ad-free, visit apple.co/cbct...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It connects technology-driven harm, deceptive identities, and undercover reporting through carefully chosen introductions to CBC investigations.
Hosted by Takara Small, A Death in Cryptoland now gives much of its feed to introductions from other CBC documentary series. Its selections repeatedly find crime where technology, constructed identity, and institutional power become tools of harm.
This is the feed that keeps handing you the first episode of another CBC investigation.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sober account of how deepfake porn developed, and why the harm spread so quickly.
The episode opens with CutieCinderella's shock at waking up to Twitter attention, then moves into the machinery behind deepfake porn. It traces the shift from fake celebrity porn assembled by hand to newer automated image-making methods, with Ian Goodfellow and generative models…
An origin story about privilege, power, and the making of Musk.
A Death in Cryptoland folds into The Making of Musk, a four-part series that asks what, if anything, explains Elon Musk and whether his ambition and uglier habits can be traced back to youth in apartheid South Africa.
A climbing death opens into a careful portrait of false identities and reinvention.
Stephen Chua begins with Jesse James's death in Squamish, British Columbia, then follows the trail of false identities and online traces that shaped the story before and after it.
A ship repossession story that turns lawlessness into tight, unnerving documentary drama.
This episode hangs its story on a maritime repossession job with a hard center: Max Hardberger, moving through the gray area of law and force to recover a stolen ship.
A sharp account of how the web was bent toward brittleness.
Doctorow frames the internet's decline as a design choice, not an accident. He lays out the early web's promise, then follows how ads, surveillance, slop, and concentrated platform incentives made that promise brittle.
Undercover reporting that treats infiltration as human cost, not a stunt.
Agent Pale Horse follows Scott Payne through years inside extremism, from outlaw bikers to drug cartels to an international neo-Nazi network with race-war ambitions. The episode stands out for treating undercover work as a human burden as much as an investigative feat.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
A murder rumor in rural Alabama unravels into a clockmaker's suicide and estate feud.
Tech journalist Sam Cole traces the history of AI-generated deepfake porn from 1996 Usenet celebrity fake communities through the 2014 invention of Generative Adversarial Networks to its mainstream arrival in 2023 when Twitch streamer CutieCinderella discovered she'd been deepfaked after a colleague accidentally exposed a porn site during a live broadcast.
A CBC investigative podcast traces Elon Musk's worldview to his childhood in apartheid-era Pretoria, using accounts from a schoolmate who recalls every character in Musk's computer RPG being named 'Elon the Most Something.' Host Jacob Silverman opens by describing the May 2025 Oval Office meeting where Musk watched silently as conspiracy theories about white South African farmers — which he had helped amplify — were displayed to South Africa's president.
Jesse James is found dead in Squamish, British Columbia.
Ian Urbina opens the second season of The Outlaw Ocean with a story about Max Hardberger, a man who makes his living recovering ships from places where normal rules are weak.
Cory Doctorow argues that the internet’s decline was on purpose, not inevitable.
The episode opens with a warning.