In late 2022, Eli Regalado, an online preacher and self-declared prophet, was confronted with a worldly problem: He owed employees at his Colorado marketing firm back pay, and they were starting to grumble.
According to one ex-employee, Regalado made a proposal. Rather than give the worker cash, he would offer payment in a cryptocurrency known as INDXcoin, which he had founded and was selling to churchgoers around the country.
“He’s like, ‘Pray about it,’” the ex-staffer told The Daily Beast. “And I’m like, ‘The Lord told me no.’”
That turned out to be a righteous move. This month, Colorado’s Securities Commissioner filed civil fraud charges against Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, alleging that they used their online ministry, Victorious Grace Church, to dupe over 300 INDXcoin investors out of $3.2 million—almost half of which was misappropriated for their personal benefit.
The Regalados allegedly used the money for jewelry, handbags, cosmetic dentistry, luxury vacations, boat rentals, snowmobile adventures, home renovations, the financing of a Range Rover, and even an au pair. They also transferred more than $290,000 to Victorious Grace Church and paid tens of thousands of dollars to other church leaders who sold INDXcoin, the complaint states.
In a video to his followers that has since gone viral, Regalado cast the debacle as a divine misunderstanding.
“The charges are that Kaitlyn and I pocketed $1.3 million. And I just want to come out and say that those charges are true,” he said.
“He had a salesman-like charm … I watch out for people like this nowadays if they remind me of him.”
— Eli Regalado’s former intern
Later, he elaborated, “We sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit. We did. We took God at his word.”
Regalado, 44, explained that much of that money had gone to the IRS, while hundreds of thousands of dollars was used for “a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.”
“One of two things have happened,” he continued. “Either I misheard God, and every one of you who prayed and came in, you as well… Or two, God is still not done with this project, and he’s going to do a new thing.”
Reached by The Daily Beast, Kaitlyn Regalado declined to comment. “Thank you,” she added. “God bless.”
According to the Colorado complaint, the Regalados marketed their unregistered securities by quoting the Bible, telling people their investment would bring “abundance” and “blessings.”
“It was last October [20]21, that the Lord brought this cryptocurrency to me,” Regalado declared in one video. “He said ‘Take this to my people for a wealth transfer.’ It has been confirmed a hundred times since then.”
The lawsuit says the couple failed to inform prospective investors that they weren’t actually licensed to sell securities and had no crypto experience; that INDXcoin wasn’t backed by any assets; that the coin could only be traded on their platform Kingdom Wealth Exchange; or that a third-party auditor found INDXcoin and KWE “catastrophically technologically deficient.”
Eli and Kaitlyn Regalado on a video call giving an INDXcoin “liquidity update” to their congregation.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Facebook
Former acquaintances are stunned by Regalado’s journey: from jail for boosting cars to Denver marketing maven (who raised more than $1 million for Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects) to RV-living online preacher. He claimed to have worked with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, and he sold online courses on Udemy. (A representative for Wozniak had “never heard of” Regalado and speculated that he may simply have purchased a customized video from Wozniak on Cameo.)
“He had a salesman-like charm,” a former intern for Regalado’s old firm, which he no longer owns, told The Daily Beast. “He got really good at cold calling people and talking them into different things.”
“I watch out for people like this nowadays if they remind me of him,” the ex-intern added.
“You’re out of your mind and you’re in the spirit and that’s the best place to be.”
— Eli Regalado
One former acquaintance, an entrepreneur who mentors young talent, echoed that sentiment: “I think Eli deserves to get what’s coming to him.”
Years before the alleged crypto scam, the entrepreneur sent Regalado a prescient email after he failed to deliver on a promise to develop an online marketing course.
“My hope, Eli, is that you understand that your gift to be able to sell anything to anyone is a gift,” the email said, “but all gifts can easily be destructive as well.”
Regalado has apparently made a similar impression for much of his life. “Even back in high school, I remember he was definitely already an entrepreneur, but he was also known as a serious sketchball,” one Bear Creek High School classmate told The Daily Beast. “He was just always shifty.”
Another peer recalled Regalado as socially adrift, “between, like the athletes and, I mean, I guess we were called freaks back then.”
In a 2022 podcast with his wife titled “The Secret Place,” Regalado said he went from “honor roll” and “three-sport letterman” to high school dropout, getting into drugs, stealing sports cars and forging birth certificates to obtain fake IDs. “What I thought was gonna be, you know, joy riding and just having fun turned out to be organized crime,” he said.
According to public records, Regalado was arrested multiple times between ages 18 and 21 on charges including possession of burglary tools, trespassing, assault, possession of stolen property, and aggravated motor vehicle theft.
He was found guilty of aggravated motor vehicle theft over $15,000 in 2000 and quickly got out on probation after requesting a reconsideration of his eight-year sentence. But six months later, he told his podcast, he “smashed a beer bottle over a guy’s face” at a house party and went on the lam. “Now I’m looking at an aggravated felony assault with a deadly weapon because I used a bottle to permanently injure someone,” he said.
Incarcerated a second time, Regalado again heard the Holy Spirit, who told him to file for another sentence reconsideration. He succeeded.
“So I get out, and I’m just on fire for the Lord,” he said.
His faith was shattered, however, when a pastor suggested God wouldn’t speak directly to him, and that he was either making it up or Satan was trying to deceive him. Regalado said he went from “hero to zero,” from talking to God all day and “getting revelation upon revelation upon revelation” to hearing radio silence.
Regalado said that after his release, he went through two divorces, had two kids, and partied hard with drugs and alcohol. “My life was just a complete dumpster fire on the inside,” he recounted. “Now on the outside, from what the world saw, it was amazing. We had a successful company. I was meeting with the who’s who of the world, thought leaders, change makers, literally presidents from different countries.”
He founded a marketing agency in 2013 and began raising funds for startups’ Kickstarter projects. One of them was Dan Wilson’s Tucktec, a foldable kayak that raised $100,000 in 12 hours. Wilson told The Daily Beast his crowdfunding campaign was so successful that he referred others to Regalado’s firm. “There was no indication of anything other than straight honest business,” he said, adding that he was shocked by the crypto news.
At one point, Regalado told his podcast, the firm experienced a “drought season” and “the devil was coming big time against the finances, against the deals.” Despite this, he said, God told him to rent a penthouse apartment. When his personal and financial pressures didn’t cease, he resorted to praying in tongues, and God began to share visions in his dreams, he added.
Regalado’s business, former employees say, typically involved an up-front fee and a percentage of the fundraising proceeds. “Do I think he was creating something of value around crowdfunding? Yes,” the former acquaintance said. “He was really really good. But I think that ran its course.”
“He’s like, ‘Pray about it.’ And I’m like, ‘The Lord told me no.’”
— An ex-staffer of Regalado’s business who was offered his salary in crypto
“He probably developed an expensive habit or two,” the person continued. “When you start making money your standard of living goes up.” (In 2017, Regalado created a blog called “The New Rich,” for people “looking to escape the 9-5” and “create wealth for yourself.”)
Public records show Regalado and a former spouse racked up tens of thousands of dollars in federal tax liabilities. In May 2018, a federal tax lien worth $72,097 was filed in Larimer County and another for $61,797 arrived in August 2019. Regalado also owed $26,181 in unpaid taxes in Arapahoe County.
He paid two of those tax bills months before his crypto exchange shut down, the records show.
The former employee said Regalado’s firm—which was renamed Grace Led Marketing in 2020—lost steam as he hired friends and family without experience and made them watch an hour or two of prosperity pastor sermons every morning. The prosperity gospel, popularized by televangelists including Oral Roberts and Joel Osteen, teaches that the Christian faith promises health and wealth to believers. That year, Regalado also held Bible studies in his residence, creating a kind of home church during COVID.
“We raised $3.8 million on one campaign and we got 15 percent of it,” the person recalled. “Then the Lord told him to hire a bunch of people. The next thing you know we have 12 employees… Like the 12 apostles.” (This figure seems to match Regalado’s own comments on on his podcast: “We’d raise typically between $100,000 to $400,000 for clients, you know, on average in a 30-day period in sales. Well, that went to $1 to $4 million overnight.”)
Eventually, Regalado told staffers God had called him away from crowdfunding and that he was launching a Christian T-shirt business.
“The Lord told him a lot of things and it doesn’t obviously happen every time,” the person said. “He would spend hours praying. His heart seemed to be in the right place. I don’t think he’s manipulating people on purpose.”
On his podcast, Regalado recounted driving his motorcycle back from New Mexico and soaking up the Rocky Mountains when the Lord told him to Venmo a couple thousand dollars to a Nebraska woman. After Regalado got home, God told him to hire her “to pray full-time for the company” for $60,000 per year.
“And what’s crazy about that, she would just call me out of the blue: ‘Hey, God says you’re struggling with this.’ And I’m like, ‘Is my house bugged?’” Regalado recalled.
The couple acknowledged that some people might scratch their heads at hiring a woman to pray for their business, but they were convinced their actions were right.
“You’re out of your mind and you’re in the spirit and that’s the best place to be,” Regalado said.
“Amen,” Kaitlyn answered.
Money began pouring into his company, he said, and he started paying some staffers six-figure salaries, doling out bonuses, and treating them to company trips that included renting a mansion in the resort town of Breckenridge.
Around that time, Regalado signed divorce papers with his ex-wife and met Kaitlyn, now 31, just 12 hours later at a boat party. As Kaitlyn tells it, she had just left San Diego for Colorado when a friend introduced her to Eli, who owned the vessel. He told her, “I’ll never lie to you and you’ll always come first.”
At first, Kaitlyn was a nonbeliever. The next day, they went on a date and Regalado led his future spouse to the Lord. “I felt like I could trust this man that I barely knew for like… 24 hours. But I felt like I could trust him with my entire life,” Kaitlyn said.
Kaitlyn became chief operating officer of Grace Led Marketing in 2020, according to her LinkedIn page, which lists her interests as “Jesus, Family, & Business!” Less than two years later, she helped cofound INDXcoin and, along with her husband, became a member of its “prophetic team” that gave Zoom updates to investors. In one April 2023 meeting, Kaitlyn sat under a thatched roof and recited a verse from the Book of Revelation.
“He would spend hours praying. His heart seemed to be in the right place.”
— An ex-staffer of Regalado’s business
Colorado authorities say the Regalados knew they were peddling a suspect product. Prior to launching the token, the complaint alleges, an outside firm conducted a security audit of INDXcoin and its parent exchange; the business scored a zero out 10.
Nevertheless, the couple excitedly announced that INDXcoin had been “proofed” by “the toughest, most legit crypto audit in the world! And before we launch! We are so far ahead of 90% of the cryptos that have existed for years!”
Regalado dismissively recalled in a livestream that INDXcoin’s auditor had claimed it would be “impossible” to fix their product’s issues.
Kaitlyn chimed in, “We got off the phone and said, ‘You know what? Our developers have the mind of Christ. What’s impossible to the world is possible for God.’
“We’re going to prove you wrong, in Jesus’ name,” she added.
Initially, the company struggled to gain traction. Regalado later said in a video that the couple’s savings dwindled to $300. Then, on cue, God came to him in a dream and instructed him to “sow” $100,000.
Lo and behold, that night, an investor put up $100,000, Regalado said. The next day, he upped his purchase to $200,000.
But customers soon began to realize that they couldn’t do much with their tokens once they bought them. The Regalados’ trading platform, Kingdom Wealth Exchange, was the only place they could be bought, sold, or traded. The Colorado complaint claims the couple told investors they just had to “wait for their ‘abundance’ to materialize, despite increasing signs that INDXcoin and the KWE were failing.”
“What I thought was gonna be, you know, joy riding and just having fun turned out to be organized crime.”
— Eli Regalado, recounting his youthful stint in jail
The Regalados allegedly boasted that “$200 million” worth of coins “had been sold and distributed when in fact defendants had given many coins away for free or at deep discount and those coins were essentially worthless.”
Last fall, Regalado announced that they were shutting KWE down, blaming the issue on high server costs and an insufficient number of “stakers.” The complaint cites a different culprit: the defendants “had bled all funding dry.”
Despite his admitted failings, some of Regalado’s followers continue to defend him. The comment board beneath his “God made me remodel my house” video, which is now private, was filled with messages of support. His acolytes on Facebook seem to be sticking by him, too. “Hope and victory to both of you,” one user wrote in response to Regalado’s sermon on January 21, which was dedicated, appropriately, “to those of us who are going through it.”
Eli and Kaitlyn Regalado in front of the RV where they live and preach.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/LinkedIn
“I do not believe Eli had any malicious or manipulative spirit in any personal or business dealings,” one former colleague wrote in an email. “I truly believe he wants the best for everyone he’s involved with.”
Even people who lost money investing in INDXcoin would only share positive things about the pastor with The Daily Beast.
Susan Hutchinson, an administrative assistant in Connecticut who bought a small number of tokens, said she was attracted to INDXcoin because it seemed like a vehicle “not about just helping myself, but helping to build God’s kingdom.” She still believes in the project.
“I truly don’t believe in throwing away a person just because they make a mistake,” she said. Regalado’s video only reinforced her support for him. “I mean, he was so honest… He basically explained the whole thing, and he didn’t hide anything.”
Another former coworker was less charitable, arguing that Regalado’s enchantment with the “prosperity gospel” has convinced him that his faith in Jesus guarantees his success. “I just feel like he’s gotten pretty delusional.”
Be it delusion or devotion, the civil charges don’t appear to have rocked the podcasting preacher. “What we’re praying for, and what we’re believing for still, is that God is going to do a miracle,” he said this month. “God is going to work a miracle in the financial sector. He’s going to bring a miracle into INDXcoin.”
