Judge freezes accounts of pastor who sold worthless cryptocurrency to Christians
A judge in Denver, Colorado, ordered the financial accounts of a pastor and his wife frozen after they sold $3.2 million in a worthless cryptocurrency to their Christian followers, then pocketed $1.3 million for their personal use, characterizing their actions as “unmitigated greed."
The online pastor, Eligio "Eli" Regalado, and his wife, Kaitlyn, who lead Victorious Grace Church, are facing civil fraud charges related to their cryptocurrency.
“This case is a sad case for me. It’s one of the more egregious cases I have seen where someone in the name of faith, the name of God, preyed upon his congregants and he did so in the name of the Lord,” Denver District Court Judge David Goldberg said Monday, according to The Denver Post.
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After a two-hour hearing on the case, Golberg ruled that the couple, their companies, and church shouldn't have access to their alleged ill-gotten gains and shouldn’t sell their cryptocurrency or other investments in the state.
Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan recently charged the Denver couple along with INDXcoin, LLC, Kingdom Wealth Exchange LLC, and other parties with selling $3.2 million worth of a cryptocurrency the Regalados created called "INDXcoin" to hundreds of Christians while claiming God said the investment would make them wealthy.
They are accused of violations of the anti-fraud, licensing and registration provisions of the Colorado Securities Act, the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies said in a release.
According to the complaint filed by the Colorado Attorney General's Office, Regalado is a pastor "who preaches through the Victorious Grace Church" and used his "connections in the evangelical Christian community to specifically target members of other churches."
The complaint said investigators from the Colorado Division of Securities found that from June 2022 to April 2023, INDXcoin raised nearly $3.2 million from more than 300 individuals who were recruited as investors from Christian communities in Denver. And even after authorities shut down INDXcoin and Kingdom Wealth Exchange, Regalado insisted to investors that God had everything under control while he was busy splurging their money on personal expenses.
“The red flags were their expenses for personal purposes,” Ioana Dobra, a fraud investigator with the Colorado Division of Securities, said about an audit of the couple’s bank accounts. “Jewelry purchases, vacations, airline tickets, clothing, and home remodeling.”
In a recent response to the charges, Regalado insisted that he was simply following what he believed to be God’s voice.
"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 went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do," he said.
"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."
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