Canada’s self-proclaimed “crypto king”, Aiden Pletersky, was kidnapped, tortured and held for ransom after allegedly embezzling millions from investors, court documents claim.
Pleterski filed for bankruptcy last August.
The 23-year-old had promised investors that he would collect their money and invest it in cryptocurrencies and foreign currency. But of the $41.5 million he received, Pletersky allegedly invested only $670,000, less than 2 percent of the total amount.
Meanwhile, Pleterski reportedly spent close to $16 million on his “personal lifestyle,” which included renting private jets, luxury vacations and buying exotic cars, including “Ferrari, four Audi’s, three Lamborghini’s, three McLaren’s, a Land Rover and a BMW”
In December, bankruptcy trustee Rob Stelcher was notified by Toronto police that Pleterski had been kidnapped. Documents filed on March 14 included testimony from Pleterski’s father, Dragan Pleterski.
“They took him away,” Pleterski’s father said. “They basically held him for about three days, drove him to different parts of southern Ontario, beat him, tortured him, allowed him to make phone calls only to certain people.”
One of the people Pleterski communicated with while in captivity was his landlord, Sandeep Gupta. Pleterski asked Gupta for $3 million to pay his kidnappers, according to court documents.
As reported by decrypt, Pleterski’s father testified that his son was eventually released on the condition that he would quickly find money to pay his kidnappers and not contact the police authorities.
“He was released under the threat that he had to find some money quickly, and that if he went to the police, he would have a lot more problems,” Pleterski’s father said.
According to Pleterski’s testimony, the problems first appeared for the 23-year-old in November 2021, when he claimed to have lost all his investments at a time when cryptocurrency markets began to plunge. As his losses began to mount, he took very aggressive positions to try to “get some clients’ money back.”
“I basically tried to redeem myself […] but obviously in doing that, I guess you could say that greed prevailed,” he testified. “I was trying to make returns that were obviously not possible or not necessarily possible at the time, and I just caused more losses.”
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