The rise and fall of Canada’s Crypto King

In today’s The Big Story podcast, Aiden Pleterski built a reputation as the ‘Crypto King’ and is alleged to have been living lavishly on investors’ money. A couple of weeks ago, the man from Whitby, Ont., was charged with fraud. Now there are handfuls of lawsuits, allegedly tens of millions in missing money and a tangled web of angry investors.

Jennifer Pagliaro is a crime reporter at The Toronto Star. “We still don’t know exactly how many individual investors, but total dollar amount had given him $41.5 million,” said Pagliaro. 

So how did this all go down? How did Pleterski allegedly defraud investors? And why were investors handing their money to a kid barely out of high school in the first place?