Aiden Pleterski: Jury Finds the 'Crypto King' Guilty of Fraud

On Thursday 29 October 2026, Aiden Pleterski stood in a courtroom of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto and heard a jury find him guilty of fraud over C$5,000. The jurors began deliberating at about 10:30 in the morning and were back with their verdict at 11:50. Pleterski, 27, from Whitby, Ontario, who called himself the "Crypto King" on social media, had run his own defence for four weeks without a lawyer. He appeared emotional as the verdict was read, CBC News reported.

He will live under house arrest until he is sentenced. His parents, who were in court, are his sureties: relatives who vouch to the court, with their own money at stake, that he will keep to his bail conditions. Fraud over C$5,000, the more serious of Canada's two fraud categories, carries a maximum of 14 years in prison. He is due back in court on 13 November 2026, when dates for a sentencing hearing are to be set, and he has hired a lawyer, Marco Sciarra, for that stage.

Prosecutors said that between July 2020 and July 2022 Pleterski took money from investors with a promise to trade it in crypto and foreign exchange, guaranteed they would not lose what they put in, and spent it instead: on supercars, private jets and a rented lakefront mansion in Burlington, Ontario. Investors forced him into bankruptcy in 2022. Durham Regional Police and the Ontario Securities Commission, the provincial stock market regulator, arrested him in May 2024. The story of the pitch, the mansion and the investors who testified is told in the earlier report on the opening weeks of the trial.

What the jury decided

The verdict covers one charge. Pleterski was also charged with laundering the proceeds of crime, but the Crown, as prosecutors are called in Canada, withdrew that charge on 26 October at the end of its case. He was not acquitted of it; the jury was simply never asked to decide it. He stands convicted of fraud and of nothing else.

The jury did not settle an amount either. Its verdict means it was sure the fraud involved more than C$5,000. The larger numbers came from the evidence. Albert Ciorma, a senior forensic accountant at the Ontario Securities Commission, went through Pleterski's bank records and testified that investors gave him C$36.3 million between 2020 and 2022. None of it, he said, went to FXChoice, the trading platform named in the investors' contracts, and only about C$113,000 went to any trading platform at all. More than C$16.3 million went on Pleterski himself, including about C$5.6 million on luxury cars, C$4.9 million on credit card bills and nearly C$3.7 million given to his parents. Another C$16.1 million was paid out to investors as "returns". That was other investors' money, which is how a Ponzi scheme keeps going: early investors are paid with later investors' cash until the new cash stops.

A second, larger total has been quoted for years. Grant Thornton, the accounting firm appointed as Pleterski's bankruptcy trustee, reported in 2023 that he and his company, AP Private Equity Limited, took in C$41.5 million from investors, about US$30 million, and that only about C$670,000, or 1.6 per cent, was ever invested. Both totals come from bank records and were worked out separately. Published reporting has not explained the C$5.2 million gap between them. Neither counts cash or crypto, and Norman Groot, a lawyer for some investors, has said real losses could be close to double the trustee's figure. The bankruptcy has returned about C$3 million to roughly 160 investors.

The $311 million account that never existed

The Crown's case leaned on one invented number. In the spring of 2022, as investors grew anxious, Pleterski sent some of them screenshots and a video of an FXChoice account showing a balance of more than $311 million. One investor and former friend, Mitchell Learning, testified that he went to the Burlington mansion in June 2022, got into Pleterski's email on his computer and found a message from FXChoice confirming the account had been deleted. Learning said Pleterski then admitted he had lost the money trading the year before and had been paying investors back with other investors' funds.

The Crown closed its case on Monday 26 October with its 14th witness, Chris Winn, a retired Durham Regional Police staff sergeant who said he had put in C$450,000 and got back C$330,000. The jury heard a three-hour recording of a meeting about a week after Learning's discovery, between Pleterski, a lawyer he brought and three investors including Winn. When one investor said the $300 million had "never existed", Pleterski replied that the account "basically never existed". Winn told the court that Pleterski admitted at the meeting he had not traded the money, and that "basically it's a Ponzi scheme." On the same tape Pleterski said that if he had meant to cheat anyone he would already have left the country, and that he was trying to make things right.

A defence of one cross-examination

Pleterski represented himself because, a week before the trial, Justice Shaun Nakatsuru refused to postpone it so he could hire a lawyer. The trial date had been fixed, with or without a lawyer, in June 2025. Once it began, Pleterski cross-examined only the first of the Crown's 14 witnesses; a cross-examination is the step where the accused questions a prosecution witness. To most of the others he said he did not know what to ask, or that he needed a lawyer. After the Crown closed, he chose to call no evidence and not to testify. "No, I don't have the legal expertise to do so, your honour," he told the judge.

Out of the jury's hearing, the judge read that silence differently. On the third day of the trial he told Pleterski his choice not to take part was "being done for tactical reasons", which the judge believed was aimed at a later appeal. "I am not a fool," Nakatsuru said.

On 26 October Pleterski asked for a mistrial, a ruling that a trial is so unfair it must be stopped, arguing he could not get a fair trial without a lawyer. Nakatsuru refused, and gave his full reasons on the morning of the verdict while the jury was out. "I'm still confident if Mr. Pleterski had chosen to do so he would have been able to make full defence," he said. He noted that Pleterski had brought no computer and none of the Crown disclosure, the evidence prosecutors must hand over before trial, and had not made "a single note" that the judge had seen.

The closing

On Wednesday 28 October Crown prosecutor Akshay Aurora spoke for about 90 minutes. "Mr. Pleterski was no 'Crypto King.' Far from it," he told the jury. "He was a thief." Aurora said the FXChoice account had never held more than $12,000, and that only about $4,000 had ever come into Pleterski's accounts from any crypto or forex source. "Who would delete a $300 million account?" he asked. "You wouldn't even delete a $300 account."

Pleterski then addressed the jury for the first time. "I am the least qualified person here to give a closing statement," he said. "However, that being said, I am innocent of these charges." Had he not been forced to represent himself, he said, that would have been proven. The next morning the jury needed less than an hour and a half.

The other case

Pleterski is also the victim in a separate prosecution. In December 2022 he was abducted in Toronto, held for three days and tortured by men demanding a C$3 million ransom. One of them, Deren Akyeam-Pong, pleaded guilty in October 2025 to nine charges including kidnapping. At his sentencing hearing in October 2026 the Crown asked for 23 years and the defence for 12, and he was still awaiting sentence when the fraud verdict came. Reading a victim impact statement there on 15 October, Pleterski said he feared "sharing a jail cell with my kidnappers". CBC News reported that three other men were due to stand trial for the kidnapping later in 2026.