Trader from Pilar sentenced for defrauding friends and investigation ordered for his mother

Pedro Ilincheta, the alleged trader accused of defrauding a group of 14 friends from a country club in Pilar whom he convinced to give him money for cryptocurrency investments, was sentenced to three years and two months in prison by the Court of Correction No. 2 in San Isidro. Judge María Emma Prada considered him the author of 14 counts of fraud. The prosecution had requested four years of effective imprisonment, while the plaintiffs, represented by lawyers Fernando Madeo Facente and Santiago Bongiovanni, had demanded six. The defense had requested acquittal. Ilincheta, known as "Pepo" or "Peter", will not go to prison for the moment. The magistrate decided to maintain the leniency of the preventive detention that had already been granted: house arrest with electronic monitoring until the sentence becomes final. The ruling also opened a new chapter in the case. Prada ordered the proceedings to be sent to the General Prosecutor's Office for investigation into the possible involvement of María Cecilia Cabeza, the convicted man's mother, in crimes related to the maneuvers for which her son was judged. The request had been made during the trial by the prosecutor. Cabeza's situation had appeared at different times during the investigation. One of the victims stated that when he was supposed to deliver USD 4,000 to Ilincheta, he was told that the cash would be picked up by his mother. Another complainant claimed that in his credit card statements, he found transfers of approximately $450,000 to Cabeza's and the accused's sister's Mercado Pago accounts. Furthermore, the analysis conducted by specialists on cryptocurrency movements identified transactions between Ilincheta's Binance account and an account on the same platform in his mother's name. Precisely because of these elements, both the prosecution and the representation of the victims had requested an investigation into her potential involvement.

How the scheme worked

According to what was established in the process, Ilincheta primarily targeted people from his circle of trust and offered to invest their money in cryptocurrencies. In different cases, he promised a return of 26% during the first three months and then 5% monthly, while assuring that the funds could be withdrawn. For a time, his clients received screenshots of Excel spreadsheets showing their supposed earnings. This mechanism generated trust and led several to increase their investments and even recommend the business to other friends. When they began to request the return of their money, postponements and excuses appeared. The initial complaint spoke of a loss of USD 276,991, but that figure included the returns that Ilincheta had promised or reported. The accounting expertise conducted during the investigation established that the amounts effectively reported as delivered totaled USD 100,628.91: USD 46,847.30 would have been sent to Binance accounts and USD 53,781.61 through other modalities. However, the expertise did not manage to fully reconstruct what happened to the money. Experts concluded that it was not possible to determine the destination of all the funds deposited in the digital accounts nor establish how much money Ilincheta had withdrawn. The analysis of Binance also showed that there were no sub-accounts that allowed differentiating which funds belonged to each investor. Ilincheta maintained a different version during the case. He claimed that he did indeed conduct operations with cryptocurrencies and futures contracts through platforms like Binance, Bybit, BingX, and Nexo; he denied having deliberately sought out the 14 victims to capture their money and asserted that he too had suffered financial harm. He also rejected having used the funds for personal purposes and maintained that he always intended to return them.

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