The Colorado Securities Commissioner filed civil fraud charges against Colorado pastor Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn. The couple is accused of defrauding 300 Christian investors of $3.2 million by selling them an "illiquid and practically worthless" cryptocurrency called INDXcoin. According to a press release issued by the Colorado Securities, Regalado targeted Christian communities in Denver, claiming God "told him directly that investors would become wealthy if they put money into INDXcoin."
"We allege that Mr. Regalado took advantage of the trust and faith of his own Christian community and that he peddled outlandish promises of wealth to them when he sold them essentially worthless cryptocurrencies," said Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan. "New coins and new exchanges are easy to create with open source code. We want to remind consumers to be very skeptical."
Pastor Regalado issued a video statement recounting his conversation with Jesus, who sound like a sleazy crypto bro. Molly White posted the video to Twitter. (It's also posted below). I am not a lawyer, but it doesn't seem like the pastor is helping himself much here:
Kaitlyn and I are being charged in a civil charge from the Colorado Securities and Exchange Commission for basically selling millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency that is deemed worthless by the state. Now, the reason that they're saying that it's worthless is because there is no exit for people who have bought.
We launched an exchange, the exchange technology failed, things went downhill. And from that point forward, we've just been waiting on the Lord, literally, for a miracle.
So the charges are that Kaitlyn and I have pocketed $1.3 million, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true. So there's been $1.3 million that's been taken out of. I think it was a total of 3.4 million. But out of that 1.3, half a million dollars went to the IRS, and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.
So how this whole thing started is the Lord told us in '21 to walk away from our marketing company. And he said, "I'm going to do a new thing." And then he took us into this cryptocurrency. It was a different cryptocurrency other than [garbled] index coin at the time.
Well, that cryptocurrency turned out to be a scam. And so the Lord says, "Give that to 'em, but also give them a 10X."
And I'm like, "Well, where's this liquidity going to come from? And the Lord says, "Trust me."
Well, as money is coming in, we would be sowing it, and at first, it was hundreds of dollars, then thousands of dollars, then tens of thousands of dollars. Money would come in. We'd tithe, we'd sow, more money would come in. And so we were just always under the impression that God was going to provide, that the source was never ending, that God was doing a new thing.
And that we had nothing to worry about.
We sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit. We did. We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit. And so the prosecutors have to take that and say, these people willingly sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit. What we're praying for and what we're believing for still is that God is going to do a miracle. God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector.
A tip for Pastor Regalado: stop listening to the voice in your head for financial advice, unless you want to end up like the Texas radio host who was given 3 life sentences for scamming his Christian listeners out of millions.
