Sacha Amar Singh, a real estate developer, described being drawn in by Aiden Pleterski — a teenager who had taken to calling himself the "crypto king" — recalling that he viewed the young man as a potentially rare talent in the field. Singh recounted that his introduction to Pleterski came through a mutual contact, Akil "A.K." Heywood, and that the two met at a Pickering restaurant in April 2021 — at a time when Pleterski was being widely described among those in their circle as an up-and-coming figure in the field.
Aware of the elevated risk involved, he put forward only $10,000 as an opening position. When the wire transfers finally ceased, Pleterski had taken in a total of $3.6 million from the man — funds channelled through a text-message thread where the contact appeared under the alias "Aiden Banker" and periodic updates arrived purporting to show healthy returns each week.
By the following year, Singh had retrieved only $700,000 of his total funds, at which point he put it to Pleterski directly that the money being returned appeared to have come from other investors rather than his own holdings.
Fraud charges exceeding $5,000, alongside a money laundering count, are ones Pleterski — aged 27 — has entered a not guilty plea against. Testimony at his jury trial has come from multiple investors who allege that the defendant — known for projecting an image of private jet travel and an accumulation of luxury sports cars through an online presence — defrauded them of millions of dollars through a fraudulent investment operation that ran for a limited period.
Testifying by video link from a time zone 12 hours ahead, Singh told the court that a November 2021 withdrawal of $1 million in profits had included a 30% cut for Pleterski under their arrangement. Pleterski sent a group message to investors the following month acknowledging what he characterised as a delay affecting fund withdrawals, with cash transactions drawing particular mention.
As spring approached, Singh's confidence in his investment wavered after Pleterski told him that a trading platform operating out of Belize had frozen their holdings, at which point Pleterski asked Singh whether the $700,000 Singh had contributed had come from FXChoice. In a conversation he covertly captured on tape with Pleterski during May 2022, Singh pressed him on whether the funds had come from other investors whose money had simply been passed along — adding that payments from those sources had continued into the prior year.
Problems with the holdups traced back to the opening weeks of December. Payment from that source stopped arriving after February. Payments to staff had been coming out of personal funds since February.
Singh asked for documentation confirming that funds were actually held in the brokerage account. To demonstrate the account balance — recorded at more than $300 million — Pleterski arranged for Mitchell Learning to bring a laptop and pull up a live screenshot of the figures.
Testimony from Learning — who put money into Pleterski's scheme alongside other investors — included an account of being shown footage of a Pleterski investment portfolio carrying a stated balance of $311 million. Upon accessing Pleterski's computer in June 2022, he found the data had been removed — prompting a phone call, later played in court, in which Learning told Pleterski that he felt deeply wronged after extending considerable help, only to be let down.
One party in the exchange put forward information the other now contests as false. Pleterski disclosed in a recorded exchange that the trading platform rested on fabricated numbers with no genuine operation behind it — a conclusion he reached after Learning walked Singh through the account balance — while Singh, visibly thrown by a figure of roughly $300 million that Mitch had displayed, raised aloud the possibility that the amount might be categorised as demo-account holdings rather than real funds.
Pleterski told Singh that withdrawals from the platform had stopped, then described his own position as one of financial strain, stating that he had been covering costs from personal funds over an extended period and that continuing to do so was no longer viable.
During cross-examination, crown attorney Scott Patterson put the same set of hypothetical scenarios to Singh that had already been put to other investors who reported financial losses — first, whether knowing the funds were being redirected elsewhere would have led Singh to proceed, and second, whether understanding that the $700,000 returned to him had originated from his own earlier contributions to Pleterski rather than any outside source would have kept him putting money in — with Singh giving a negative answer to each.
Superior Court Justice Nakatsuru put the question to Pleterski — appearing without counsel — about whether he intended to cross-examine the former client. Pleterski told the court he lacked the legal grounding to probe the gaps he perceived in that testimony, and proceedings are set to resume on Friday.
