Fernando Pérez Algaba: The Crypto Trader Lured Over a Debt and Dismembered

On 23 July 2023, a group of children playing by the Arroyo del Rey, a stream in Ingeniero Budge on the southern edge of Greater Buenos Aires, found a red suitcase. Inside were human remains. Over the next two days police drained the stream and found more. Fingerprints and tattoos identified the dead man as Fernando Pérez Algaba, a 41-year-old trader known to friends and nearly a million Instagram followers as "Lechuga".

He had been missing since 18 July, when he failed to return the keys to a rented flat and stopped answering his phone. The investigation that followed did not lead to a cartel or a foreign hit squad, as early speculation suggested. It led to former friends and business partners who, prosecutors said, owed him money. In July 2026 a jury in Lomas de Zamora found three men guilty of his murder. Four more people, including a Buenos Aires police commissioner, are still waiting to be tried.

The trader and the debts

Pérez Algaba had recently returned to Argentina from Barcelona. La Nación reported that he had founded a car rental company in Miami, Enjoy Rental Car, and dealt in high-end vehicles and jet skis. His social media showed crypto trading from an apartment in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires' expensive waterfront district, alongside luxury cars and his dog. Cointelegraph, citing local media, reported that he ran a crypto trading office in the city with about 25 traders working for him.

Crypto trading here means buying and selling digital currencies such as Bitcoin for profit, much as a day trader buys and sells shares, except that the market never closes and prices can move by double digits in an afternoon. Pérez Algaba presented himself online as someone who was winning at it.

His paperwork told a messier story. Argentina's central bank keeps a public register of borrowers, graded from 1 to 5. Pérez Algaba was in category 5, the lowest, reserved for debts considered unrecoverable, with about 1.2 million pesos owed to banks. Cointelegraph also reported bounced cheques, including one for $70,000. He was owed money as well as owing it. According to the prosecution, Maximiliano Pilepich, a former friend and partner in a property deal, still owed him about $60,000 of a $150,000 debt. Some Argentine outlets put the figure above $200,000.

The meeting in General Rodríguez

Prosecutors said Pilepich lured Pérez Algaba to a large plot of land in General Rodríguez, west of Buenos Aires, where a housing development called Renacer was in its early stages, with the promise that part of the debt would finally be paid. He went on 18 July 2023. According to the prosecution, he was shot in the back there, and his body was cut up and moved across the city to the stream where it was dumped. The case put to the jury was that the killing was planned to wipe out the debt.

Police arrested Pilepich on 16 August 2023 in Paso del Rey, where, investigators said, a woman had been hiding him at her home for several days. By the next day, nine people were in custody. The first person detained, a woman who had once owned the red suitcase, had nothing to do with the crime and was cleared. In September 2023 a judge ordered pre-trial detention for six of the seven main suspects.

The accused included Nahuel Sebastián Vargas, another former friend and partner of the victim, described by investigators as Pilepich's main accomplice; Matías Gil, Luis Contreras and Fernando Gastón Carrizo, accused of helping to dispose of the body; Flavia Bomrad, Pilepich's partner and a friend of Pérez Algaba, who prosecutors say helped arrange the meeting; and Horacio Córdoba, a commissioner in the Buenos Aires City Police, accused of supplying Pilepich with a police-issued mobile phone. All of them denied the accusations.

The verdict

The case was split in two. Pilepich, Vargas and Gil went before a 12-person popular jury at Criminal Oral Court No. 9 in Lomas de Zamora, with hearings starting on 29 June 2026. In court, Pilepich and Vargas each blamed the other for the shooting. All three asked to be acquitted, or at most to be convicted only of covering up the crime.

On 6 July 2026, after about an hour of deliberation, the jury unanimously found all three guilty of homicide aggravated by the use of a firearm, premeditation, treachery and greed. Under Argentine law that charge carries only one penalty, life imprisonment, which prosecutors and the family's lawyer requested; the court still had to hold a short sentencing hearing to impose it formally. The victim's brother, Rodolfo Pérez Algaba, told Crónica: "Finally he will rest in peace," and said the family would now go after the rest.

The rest means Bomrad, Córdoba, Carrizo and Contreras, who face an ordinary trial before the same court for their alleged roles in the plan and the cover-up. No date had been set for it as of the July verdict.

What the case shows

The story first travelled the world as a crypto mystery: a flashy online trader, a suitcase, talk of mafias. The court record is more ordinary and more grim. Prosecutors described a man killed by people he knew, over a property debt of about $150,000, with a serving police officer accused of helping.

Crypto mattered to the case mainly as image. Pérez Algaba's public life as a trader made him look rich, while the central bank register and his bounced cheques showed he was under pressure. He was still owed real money by people who, a jury has now decided, preferred to kill him than pay it.