The rise and fall of Canada’s Crypto King

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Jordan: The age of cryptocurrency has created some unlikely celebrities, perhaps none more than a Canadian kid who became known as the Crypto King. He had it all. He had the houses, the cars, the jewelry, the vacations, every trapping of wealth you could possibly imagine all flaunted on social media. And why wouldn’t he? He was worth millions and making more. So much so that investors couldn’t get enough. When he offered to help them out, their money started pouring in too, and on paper it all kept growing. Only was it really? Things started to seem a little strange. Investors got first worried, then frantic and then angry. And then while the whole thing came crashing down, now there are multiple lawsuits, allegedly, tens of millions of dollars missing. And as of two weeks ago, Canada’s Crypto King faces criminal charges. So what exactly happened here and what, if anything, can we learn from it? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jennifer Pagliaro is a crime reporter at the Toronto Star, one of our favorite guests. And this is an interesting one, Jen.

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, it’s a real rabbit hole. We’re going to try to go down it together and make it back out alive.

Jordan: For those who maybe aren’t as clued in to cryptocurrency. Who is Aiden Pleterski? AKA, I guess the Crypto King.

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah. So this guy is a GTA native, 20 something. He was 23 at the time of most of the activity that we’re going to be talking about. And he became sort of this, I would say, somewhat of a celebrity in this specific world. He was one of those sort of celebrity young investors who seemed to be making a killing in the cryptocurrency market, which was when it first started to boom, sort of seen as a young person’s game. It was this new digital currency. It was popping up in digital spaces like video games and other places that traditional investors weren’t as familiar with. And we’ve now seen a few examples in both Canada and the US where people have been allegedly defrauded by these young guns who claim to be sort of boy geniuses in this space. And police are saying that he has defrauded the people who chose to hand over their money for him to invest. And he is now the subject of not only a police investigation, but multiple lawsuits.

Jordan: And just to be clear, he’s been charged but not convicted, not yet guilty of anything. But we’re going to explore what the police claim and what they say I guess, and has been reported as the story behind it. Maybe just start with how did Aiden get into crypto in the first place?

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, this is something that fascinated me. So a lot of the information we have about Aiden comes from bankruptcy documents because after there were allegations made in civil court about his dealings with investors, he was essentially forced into bankruptcy and the court appoints a trustee to oversee this process. And they’ve posted hundreds of pages about their investigation into Aiden and his assets online. So listeners know that’s where we’re getting this information. Still allegations, but just an amazing amount of details here. So according to a interview that was conducted with Aiden himself, he claimed that he started in high school getting interested in cryptocurrency because he was playing some video games online, namely a game called Counter-Strike. It’s sort of a classic shooter game some people may be familiar with. And as part of that game, you can trade in what are called skins. It’s sort of a way to sort of embellish your character. You can make your gun look different, you can get a different type of gun, different types of weapons. There’s sort of special items that you can get. There was actually an entire market online to trade in these what are called skins. And he noticed that if you purchased some of these skins in cryptocurrency, the market would actually give you a discount when you were purchasing that. And so that made him curious about cryptocurrency as a teenager. And so he learned what cryptocurrency was. He figured out how to open an account in cryptocurrency so that he could start buying some of these skins.

Jordan: And how did that grow into the kind of investment business we’re talking about here? And I don’t think he did it that kind of growth alone, right?

Jennifer Pagliaro: That’s right. So one interesting element of how he seems to have attracted potential investors is he was really interested in cars, specifically sort of exotic and luxury cars as a lot of young people are. And there’s a service in the GTA, which people may have heard of, GTA Exotics, where you can actually rent out these cars for a day or for longer, gives you that opportunity to kind of drive your dream car around. And so he was going to these car meetups that happen around the GTA, but he would show up in these really expensive flashy cars and that would get people’s attention and they would say, Hey man, how are you affording that? And that would spark this conversation according to some of the investors that chose to give him money. And that started to spiral as he was able to come into some money. It seems as though he started to spend more of that money on cars either leased or purchased. He started to take what seemed to be very lavish vacations. He would post about that on his social media, like classic places like Instagram. And he was also doing live streaming sometimes about his video game activity and sometimes just sort of bragging about his life. He sort of presented himself as someone who had a lot of money and knew how to, knew how to invest.

Jordan: As he got going. How much money was invested with him? How big did this get, I guess?

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah. So by the time you’ve got this trustee involved with the bankruptcy, they say that a certain number of investors, and we still don’t know exactly how many individual investors, but total dollar amount had given him $41.5 million.

Jordan: And where if anywhere, I guess in this, and as this is growing and growing, did anyone start to see anything suspicious or even just something that they thought might not be right?

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, so I mean what’s fascinating about this is how long it seems to have taken for anyone to have sort of questioned the way that he conducted business or as the trustee alleges that he didn’t conduct his business from the trustee documents, we learned that he only invested a fraction of what he was given. As far as they can tell, they said it’s around 1.6%. So of that 41.5 million that the investors gave him, he seems to have only invested around 700,000, less than a million dollars.

Jordan: Wow.

Jennifer Pagliaro: Meanwhile, they have evidence, they say that he allegedly spent upwards of 16 million on his own lifestyle. So he was just taking the funds directly, they allege. And so you wonder, okay, so I’ve given this guy my money and you’d expect that you’d want to see some kind of performance update or you’d want to see some kind of gains returns the way you would in a traditional investment relationship. And that’s the part that’s sort of hard to understand. It seems like he would just text investors updates, your amount is making this much, he claimed to have pooled all the money together, and then he would do some sort of calculation to say, okay, this guy gave me this much, and so this is how much yours has grown in this amount of time. Sometimes it sounds as though he sent Excel spreadsheets to people, maybe not what you or I would expect if I’m handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for long enough it seems to have satisfied certain investors who believed this kid was really like a wunderkind and was able to make magic happen in the crypto and foreign exchange markets. And then over time, and I’m talking more than two years, I think people started to ask questions or wanted some of the money back. They needed it back for personal reasons. They wanted to invest it elsewhere. And then they started to get answers that they, I think found confusing from Aiden. One of his investors talked about some of the answers that Aiden was giving him, not making sense, and actually sort of allegedly coercing Aiden’s girlfriend at the time to helping him log into Aiden’s computer, try to see where the money went, and seeing empty accounts and sort of freaking out. And that’s in this period in 2022 when investors really started to say, Hey, what’s going on here? And that’s when the lawsuits started.

Jordan: When we say lawsuits, what kind of scale are we talking about here? How many of them, how much? That kind of stuff.

Jennifer Pagliaro: So as you can imagine, as this has been reported on, and as this is sort of unfolded, you’ve got more and more people sort of joining in. There was an initial lawsuit from one of his investors, and we’re talking about some people providing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there’s also losses involved there where they say that if that money had been invested properly, there would’ve been gains that were not realized because the allegations are that Aiden didn’t invest most of this money at all since the bankruptcy proceedings have started. It seems that investors believe that that might be the better route to actually get some of their money back because part of the bankruptcy process is that they can recover and reclaim his assets, either liquid, like if he has cash in his accounts, or for example, all of these cars and some of the other luxurious things that he’s amassed. But it’s a tricky process because so far they’ve not accumulated anywhere close to the 40 plus million dollars that he allegedly took from investors.

Jordan: All the luxury items you talked about as we began the houses, the cars, the watches, they’ve all been seized to try to make some of that money back.

Jennifer Pagliaro: So what’s interesting is there’s some new details coming out that the trustee has described Aidan’s level of cooperation as fairly poor. They have been able through various means to seize quite a few of the cars or talking McLaren’s, Lamborghinis, several Audis. So you can, if your listeners are familiar with cars start to put together, like this is in the millions of dollars once you start to add all this up. He also seemed to be interested in luxury watches, but just to give you an example, I was looking through some of the more recent records and there was record that he had purchased a watch for over $360,000, but they can’t find that watch. And he claims to have sold it for less than half that amount, but there’s no record and he hasn’t provided any evidence of the sale. So there’s a really tricky process here when it comes to the assets. And even most recently, for example, he had a Scotiabank bank account, and they’ve only recently that he had over $13,000 worth of Scene points that he had accumulated by using that account.

Jordan: Scene Points.

Jennifer Pagliaro: Scene points. Yeah, I use my scene points to get one free movie every once in a while, but for folks familiar with this, Scotiabank offers a credit card version of the scene card and you can accumulate points that way. And so he actually had these points that he apparently allegedly, according to the trustee, has been using to finance travel even in recent post bankruptcy months. And according to the trustee in its most recent filing online, he apparently spent almost $500,000 US on these online skins that are attached to his gaming profile. He uses a very popular gaming platform called Steam that controls this market. And so they haven’t been able to recover that money, which falls under his asset list, or if he did in fact purchase those skins to recover those, and if they were able to, they would presumably sell them to regain the money to payback these investors. And so it’s this real web of stuff that they’re still piecing through.

Jordan: And that’s not the only strange little sidebar to this story. I understand there’s a Canadian NBA star involved here somehow. What’s happening there?

Jennifer Pagliaro: So Aiden was living in a multimillion dollar property in Burlington according to the trustee records. He was renting it for tens of thousands of dollars, and then he allegedly had this agreement with the property owner to this sort of rent to buy where he had signed an agreement to eventually purchase the house. This was all taking place as he’s being investigated and he doesn’t close on the house and he in fact moves out of the house and is no longer renting it. And so it seems as though the property owner put the house up for sale now wanting to still sell it, and now you’ve got poor Shai Gilgeous-Alexander come in with his wife who purchased his home as this dream home. And then they allegedly, according to some other media reports, have been faced with angry investors and other folks who are trying to get their money back and all of these questions about this house that’s now part of this massive investigation into Aiden. And so they leave, they essentially flee Burlington and they’re now engaged in civil lawsuits related to the property owner and to Aiden about this kerfuffle that they came into. Just totally unaware. Like I said, if you had not been paying attention to the situation, you would not know who Aiden Pleterski is, and they had no idea that they’d landed right in the middle of it.

Jordan: How has Pleterski responded to any of these allegations and all these lawsuits? What’s he doing? What has he said? How’s he acting?

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, so what’s interesting is I sort of alluded to, and the trustee is documented, he even after bankruptcy filings started continuing to travel on all sorts of apparently lavish vacations, they’ve documented, he went to London, Miami, Australia, and he was also posting about this on social media. And that’s actually how the trustee was made aware that he was still seemingly continuing this very expensive lifestyle. And that obviously begged the question, well, how is he paying for all of this? And actually that’s how they realize that he has these Scene points because when they asked him how he was paying for let’s say $8,000 in hotel expenses on one trip, he said he had this money on his Scene account from his points that he had accumulated. And it’s obviously the trustee’s position that that’s money that should have been recouped through the bankruptcy proceedings. He doesn’t seem to agree. And like I said, there’s been a lot of obfuscation according to the trustee at various points. There’s sort of this trail of emails that they post online as part of their due diligence with investors that you can read through, and it’s a very established accounting firm, Grant Thornton, who’s dealing with Aiden on this, and you’ve got various members of this accounting firm emailing Aiden, trying to get him to hand over his Steam passwords or get him to explain this big trip he went on to Miami and they’re not always getting very far, and they’re getting a lot of pushback.

Jordan: And now there are criminal charges involved in all of this, which is why we are talking to you now and following up on this story. What do we know about exactly what he’s being charged with and where are we at this point?

Jennifer Pagliaro: So he was arrested after a 16-month investigation. So as you can imagine, these lawsuits were filed starting back in 2022. And at the same time, there were complaints being made to various police services about Aiden’s activities that he had taken money and they weren’t able to get it back. And so that obviously was pursued by police. The main allegations are that he essentially defrauded these investors of their money, that he was not in fact investing that money as he purported to be to each of these investors. Again, there’s still quite a bit of secrecy around how much total for each investor and how many total investors. We know about a long list of them. But an interesting thing that the police told us earlier this month when he was arrested is that he was still soliciting investors as recently as this February. And so I don’t think we actually know the full extent of what might be put forward as part of the criminal case against him.

Jordan: And I guess then lastly, assuming that this case comes to trial, what kind of consequences are we looking at here, not only from the trial, but also from all the lawsuits?

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, so like I said, there’s sort of a back and forth about whether the lawsuits are the correct avenue to actually recoup the money that these investors want back. The main goal here obviously is you can imagine for each individual investor is they just want their money back. But there’s obviously evidence that he’s at least spent a significant portion of the money in ways that may not be recoverable, for example, on trips where that money can’t be taken back. And we’ve already seen that they’ve only been able to recover through assets that they know about a fraction of what the investors are owed. So I’m not sure any reasonable investor can really expect to recoup all of what they’ve lost because at the end of the day, he’s just this 20 something year old kid and he didn’t have money to begin with. This was all sort of created of thin air, allegedly, criminally. Of course, he faces jail time, he faces probation, he faces house arrest. He is out on bail now, but he’s had to surrender his passport so he’s no longer allowed to go on those lavish trips, even if he had money to spend on them. And I expect it will be quite a lengthy criminal process to get to the bottom of this.

Jordan: Jen, thanks so much for walking us through this. It’s fascinating.

Jennifer Pagliaro: Yeah, it’s a weird one, and we’ll look forward to see what happens next.

Jordan: Jennifer Pagliaro reporting in the Toronto Star. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can feel free anytime to send us some feedback. The way to do that is via email. Hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca is the address or via a voicemail, which you can leave by calling 416-935-5935. As you probably know by now, but just in case you don’t, you can find The Big Story in absolutely any podcast player you prefer. And when you’re there, we’d love it if you gave us a rating or left us a review. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page