'I knew his parents': Investor scammed by 'Crypto King' testifies during trial after handing over $150K+

Instead, Valerio never got any of his money back, telling the court that “it impacted the relationship with my wife,” adding “it hasn’t been easy.”

Pleterski, 27, has pleaded not guilty to fraud over $5,000 and money laundering, and none of the allegations have been proven in court. Regardless of the jury’s eventual decision, the case already carries a crucial lesson for Canadian investors: sometimes the biggest risk isn’t the investment — it’s the person who’s holding your money.

What is the ‘Crypto King’ accused of?

Pleterski was charged as part of Project Swan, a joint investigation by Durham Regional Police and the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), the regulator that oversees Ontario’s investment markets. Durham police called it the region’s largest-ever fraud investigation.

In the Crown’s opening statement, prosecutor Scott Patterson alleged Pleterski guaranteed the money investors gave him for cryptocurrency and foreign exchange trading between July 2020 and July 2022. However, he never actually invested the funds on their behalf.

The Crown is expected to call more than a dozen witnesses to testify during the roughly month-long trial. Pleterski has chosen to represent himself.

Where did investors’ money go?

Collectively, investors handed Pleterski more than $40 million to invest on their behalf. After some of them forced him into bankruptcy in 2022, the proceedings recovered roughly $3 million for about 160 victims. That works out to about 7.5 cents back for every dollar invested.

Bankruptcy trustee Grant Thornton found Pleterski invested less than 2% of the money while spending nearly $16 million on himself — a finding he contests. An earlier trustee report detailed how he purchased 11 high-end cars while also spending about $45,000 a month on a waterfront rental in Burlington, Ont.

Many of the people waiting for repayment weren’t wealthy speculators who could write off the loss as a single bad investment. Trustee Rob Stelzer told CTV News Toronto back in 2022 that many were ordinary investors who had put in amounts like $25,000, $50,000 or $100,000.

Why do careful people fall for promises like this?

Schemes like this rarely look like fraud at first glance. They tend to arrive through friends, family or social media, with a veneer of success — cars, travel, screenshots of gains. That proof can feel more convincing than any paperwork ever could.

However, it’s the paperwork that truly matters. According to OSC senior investigator Stephen Henkel, neither Pleterski nor his co-accused associate held any OSC registration. When Pleterski told the bankruptcy trustee he’d lost most of the money to margin calls and bad trades, he was asked to provide trade records and bank statements to back that up — as of late August 2022, the trustee hadn’t received anything.