A Denver grand jury has indicted a married couple on 40 counts of theft, fraud and deceit, for allegedly operating a multi-million-dollar cryptocurrency scam that mostly targeted churches, the Denver District Attorney announced in a press release on Tuesday.
Between 2022 and July 2023, Eli Regalado, who is also a pastor who preaches at the Victorious Grace Church, and his wife Kaitlyn, the only other employee at the church which they host at their home, allegedly solicited nearly $3.4 million from investors looking to buy their INDXcoin cryptocurrency from their Kingdom Wealth Exchange.
The couple targeted Christians from their church as well as other churches to buy their cryptocurrency, promising huge returns, the district attorney alleged, but in the end the INDXcoin maintained zero value and more than 300 investors lost their money. The Regalados spent $1.3 million of the proceeds from their token sales on personal expenditures, like a home renovation, the indictment said.
The INDXcoin whitepaper stated that the coin was “engineered to grow as the cryptocurrency market explodes by benchmarking the world’s top 100 cryptocurrencies, allowing users to capitalize on growth while mitigating risk.” However, the indictment said this was deceptive.
“Eli and Kaitlyn Regalado deceived prospective and current investors, and did not disclose to them: that Defendants lacked liquidity to support the amount of INDXcoin then outstanding and that INDXcoin was not ‘pegged’ to a certain value or the average of the top-100 cryptocurrencies in the world, but instead was backed by essentially no assets whatsoever and had no real value,” the indictment said.
Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan initially filed charges against the pair last year. In March the pastor appeared in a video message and stated that the “charges are true.” He also said at the time the venture was something he believed God had told him to do.
“The Lord told us to walk away from our parking company. … [H]e took us into this cryptocurrency … well, that cryptocurrency turned out to be a scam…. And I said Lord … you told me to do this,” he said in the video.