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25th January 2024
10:23am GMT
A pastor who is accused of stealing $1.3 million through a cryptocurrency fraud scheme has claimed that the "Lord told us to."
Eli Regalado and his wife Kaitlyn marketed their own cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, to Christian communities in Denver, Colorado.
The pair managed to raise nearly $3.2 million from 300 people with the crypto which they promoted as a low risk, high profit investment.
But according to a complaint filed in Denver County District Court, the couple pocketed at least $1.3 million of the money. They allegedly spent the money on their lavish lifestyle which included buying a Range Rover, luxury handbags, jewellery, an au pair, boat rentals and snowmobile adventures, NBC News reports.
"The Regalados had no experience in cryptocurrency which was clear when a third-party auditor’s report allegedly described their INDXcoin code as unsafe, unsecure and riddled with serious technical problems," a press release from the Colorado Division of Securities reads.
The complaint said INDXcoin was "illiquid and practically worthless."
Commissioner Chan accused Regalado of taking advantage "of the trust and faith of his own Christian community."
"He peddled outlandish promises of wealth to them when he sold them essentially worthless cryptocurrencies,” he added. "New coins and new exchanges are easy to create with open source code. We want to remind consumers to be very skeptical."
Regalado has admitted the he and his wife pocketed $1.3 million, but said in a video statement on INDXcoin community forum that he did so on the instruction of "the Lord."
The pastor said: "The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed £1.3m, and I just want to... say that those charges are true.
"There's been £1.3m that's been taken out of, I think, £3.4m, but out of the 1.3, half a million dollars went to the IRS, and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel the Lord told us to do.
"I don't want to mince words or escape but I want to... tell you how we got here. It wasn't that we had a million dollars sitting there and decided to go crazy with it."
He added: "We're going to go to court and we're going to argue our case and say why we did it, and here's all the journal entries leading up to this, but, yes, we're in agreement, we did do this.
"We took God at his word and sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.
"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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