미국 콜로라도의 목사 부부 엘리·케이틀린 레갈라도가 '하나님의 지시'라며 신앙 공동체에 자체 암호화폐 INDXcoin을 판매해 500여 명에게서 300만 달러 이상을 거둬들이고 결국 전액을 증발시킨 사건을 다룬 조사 보도다. 암호화폐 사기 피해가 급증하는 가운데(2025년 전 세계 최소 140억 달러), 신뢰 기반 공동체를 노린 투자 사기의 전형적 사례로 주목된다.
번역된 본문
이 기사는 Type Investigations와 공동 제작되었으며 언론인 조사 기금(Fund for Investigative Journalism)의 지원을 받았다.
엘리 레갈라도가 처음 하나님의 음성을 들었을 때, 그는 자신이 환각을 보는 게 아닌지 의심했다. 지금 그는 그 경험을 '나의 생각이 아닌 생각'이 떠오르는 것에 비유한다. 신성한 말씀은 영화의 대사나 사랑하는 사람의 목소리 기억처럼 그의 마음에 울려 퍼진다. "'너 이것부터 해라'가 아니에요"라고 그는 말한다. "그냥 내면의 확신이죠. 이것이 네가 해야 할 일이라고." 거룩한 메시지는 엘리가 기도하거나, 책을 읽거나, TV를 볼 때 매일같이 도착한다. 때로는 예언적 꿈이나 낯선 이들의 전갈 속에 나타난다. 간혹 문장 중간에 멈춰 '주님, 여기서 무엇을 말씀하시겠습니까?'라고 묻는 순간 나타나기도 한다.
엘리의 아내 케이틀린은 주로 샤워 중, 그제야 자신만의 시간이 생길 때 하늘의 전갈을 받는다. 다른 때는 그녀가 직접 위로 조언을 구한다. "일기를 쓰면서 기도하고 질문하면서, 듣는 것이 그분의 음성이라고 믿었어요"라고 그녀는 말한다.
하나님의 지시는 다양했다. 레갈라도 부부에 따르면, 하나님은 결혼하고, 집을 사고, 아이를 갖으라고 하셨다. 엘리가 콜로라도에서 마케팅 회사를 운영할 때는 회사 이름, 고용할 사람, 맡을 고객까지 알려주셨다. 그러고는 거실과 온라인에서 설교를 시작하라고 하셨다. 부부는 언제나 순종했다.
2021년, 엘리가 41세, 케이틀린이 28세였을 때, 신의 인도는 예상치 못한 새 방향으로 그들을 이끌었다. 바로 암호화폐였다. 그해 10월, 법정에서 후일 증언한 바에 따르면 엘리의 여동생 부부가 잘 알려지지 않은 디지털 코인 보유분 일부를 부부에게 선물했다. "이것을 내 백성에게 가져가 부의 이전을 하라"는 말을 엘리는 하나님이 하시는 것으로 들었다. 부부는 동료 기독교인들에게 이 암호화폐를 판매하라는 부름을 받았다고 느꼈다. 이후 암호화폐 배경지식이 전혀 없었음에도, 하나님이 자체 코인을 출시하기를 원하신다고 믿게 되었다. 그들은 실전에서 배우며 가족, 친구, 복음주의 기독교인 인맥을 통해 홍보하는 새 암호화폐 'INDXcoin'을 만들었다.
"정말 이것이 미래의 물결이라고 느꼈어요"라고 70대 은퇴 약국 기술자 데비 보니야가 말했다. 그녀는 남편 호세와 함께 INDXcoin을 샀다. 부부는 역시 투자했던 목사 부부인 친구들을 통해 이 코인을 알게 되었다. "그들의 판단이 좋으리라 믿었을 뿐이에요"라고 호세는 말한다. 2022년 11월부터 데비와 호세는 노후 자금의 상당 부분인 총 7만 달러를 인출해 INDXcoin을 구매했다. 모두 500여 명이 레갈라도 부부에게 총 300만 달러 이상을 맡겼다.
하지만 보니야 부부가 투자한 지 1년도 채 지나지 않아 프로젝트는 붕괴했다. 레갈라도 부부에게 거액을 맡긴 투자자들은 전액을 잃었고, 많은 이들이 돈이 어디로 갔는지 궁금해하며 일부는 정교한 사기의 희생자가 된 것은 아닌지 의심하기 시작했다. "푸우—돈이 그냥 증발해버렸어요"라고 데비는 말했다. "어떻게 그런 일이 있을 수 있죠?"
엘리는 하나님이 자신을 암호화폐로 인도하셨다고 믿었지만, 처음에는 내키지 않았다고 주장한다. "절대 안 된다고 생각했죠"라고 그는 회상한다. "암호화폐에 대해 아는 것도 없고, 교회 사기 같은 것에 휘말리고 싶지 않았어요." 암호화폐 시장은 호황을 누렸고, 레갈라도 부부는 초기 코인에 투자해 큰돈을 번 사람들을 알고 있었다. 하지만 디지털 자산에 대한 관심이 커진다는 것은 암호화폐 사기 증가를 의미하기도 했다. 블록체인 분석 업체 체인애널리시스(Chainalysis)에 따르면 2025년 암호화폐 사기꾼들은 전 세계에서 최소 140억 달러를 챙겨 전년 대비 17% 증가했다. 미국에서는 사기성 암호화폐 투자 사건 피해자들이 FBI에 신고한 손실액이 72억 달러에 달했다. 사기가 급증하는 이유 중 하나는 암호화폐에 투자하는 많은 사람들이 작동 원리를 충분히 이해하지 못하고, 디지털 코인 발행이 비교적 쉽기 때문이다. CoinMarketCap 웹사이트에 따르면 2026년 8월 한 달에만 300만 개 이상의 암호화폐가 발행되었다.
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. Now he likens the experience to having “a thought that is not my thought.” Divine words echo in his mind like a line from a movie or the memory of a loved one’s voice. “It’s not ‘You better do this,’” he says. “It’s just a knowing inside you: This is what you do .” Holy messages arrive daily while Eli is praying, reading, or watching television. Sometimes they surface in prophetic dreams or missives from strangers. Occasionally, they appear midsentence, when he pauses to ask, “Lord, what do you want to say here?” Eli’s wife, Kaitlyn, tends to get heavenly dispatches in the shower, when she finally has a moment to herself. Other times, she seeks counsel from above. “I’ll be writing in my journal and praying and asking questions and just believing what I’m hearing is Him,” she says. God’s directives have been manifold. According to the Regalados, He told them to get married, buy a house, and start having kids. When Eli owned a marketing firm in Colorado, He told him what to name it, whom to hire, and which clients to take on. Then God told him to start preaching in his living room and online. Always, the couple obeyed. In 2021, when Eli was 41 and Kaitlyn was 28, divine guidance steered them in an unexpected new direction: crypto. That October, the Regalados later testified in court, Eli’s sister and her husband gifted the couple some of their holdings in a little-known digital coin. “Take this to my people for a wealth transfer,” Eli heard God say. He and Kaitlyn felt that they were being called to sell the cryptocurrency to fellow Christians. Later, though they had no background in crypto, they came to believe that God wanted them to launch their own coin. Learning as they went, the Regalados created a new cryptocurrency called INDXcoin, which they promoted through family, friends, and contacts in evangelical Christian circles. “I was really feeling that this is the wave of the future,” says Debbie Bonilla, a retired pharmacy technician in her 70s who bought INDXcoin with her husband, Jose. The couple learned about the currency through friends—a minister and his wife, who had also invested. “We just trusted that their judgment was good,” Jose says. Starting in November 2022, Debbie and Jose withdrew a total of $70,000 from their retirement accounts—a large share of their nest egg—to buy INDXcoin. In all, more than 500 people handed over a total of more than $3 million to the Regalados. But within a year after the Bonillas bought in, the project collapsed. Investors who had entrusted the Regalados with large sums of cash lost it all, leaving many to wonder where the funds went and some to question whether they had fallen victim to an elaborate fraud. “Poof—the money just evaporated,” Debbie told me. “Like, how does that happen?” Though Eli believed God was leading him into crypto, he claims he was initially apprehensive. “Absolutely not,” he recalls thinking. “I don’t know anything about cryptocurrency, and I don’t want to be caught up in some church scam.” The crypto market was booming, and the Regalados knew people who’d made a fortune investing in early-stage coins. But a growing interest in digital assets also meant a rise in crypto fraud. In 2025, crypto scammers collected at least $14 billion worldwide, a 17% increase from the previous year, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. And in the United States, victims of fraudulent crypto investment schemes reported $7.2 billion in losses to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Fraud is on the rise partly because many people who invest in crypto don’t fully understand how it works, and launching digital coins is relatively easy. More than 3 million cryptocurrencies were minted in August 2026 alone, according to the website CoinMarketCap. “It’s just something anybody can create,” says Jason Ghetian, a former FBI special agent who has served as an expert witness in crypto cases. In the US, much of the crypto market lacks the oversight and investor protections in place in traditional finance, including rules around transparency and safeguarding customer assets. “There isn’t adequate disclosure; there’s fraud, there’s manipulation of the price, there’s conflicts of interest,” says Timothy Massad, former chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The sector is overseen by a tangled web of state and federal regulators, including the CFTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and others. But “every agency has its own tests and definitions,” says Carol Goforth, a law professor at the University of Arkansas who has written a textbook on crypto regulation. “It is a complicated, fragmented, and often inconsistent approach.” After the industry spent around $135 million backing crypto-friendly candidates in the 2024 election cycle, the federal government significantly scaled back enforcement efforts. Last year, the Justice Department disbanded its unit focused on crypto crimes, and the Trump White House created a working group aimed at “eliminating regulatory overreach on digital assets.” The SEC has dropped or retreated from the majority of its active lawsuits against crypto firms, including many with financial ties to the president, The New York Times reported. Donald Trump and his family have netted at least $2.3 billion from their crypto ventures since his reelection, Reuters recently estimated. In August 2026, the SEC proposed new rules that would narrow when crypto transactions fall under securities laws, further limiting the agency’s oversight of the industry. “Any future enforcement will have an uphill battle,” Goforth says. Even when crypto projects operate aboveboard, prices are often driven by speculation, and large swings are common. Investing in crypto comes with considerable risk, experts say. “With the exception of stablecoins, crypto assets are essentially Ponzi schemes,” says Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University. “There is nothing behind them—no cash flow, no productive capacity—so the only way they can be more valuable is to draw more people in.” In recent years, state and federal authorities have brought a series of cases against people they allege ran crypto scams that targeted religious communities—an example of what’s known as affinity fraud . Among them are a couple accused of using faith-based appeals to defraud primarily Haitian immigrants of more than $1 billion, an Instagram influencer who took in over $12 million from Muslim followers, and a Miami pastor charged with stealing millions from his Spanish-speaking congregation. “‘God told me’—who can argue with that?” Ghetian says. “The ties you have with other people—the trust you have—is what the people who are running the scam play on,” says Tung Chan, commissioner of the Colorado Division of Securities. In a civil case filed in January 2024, she accused the Regalados of using investors’ Christian faith to dupe them into buying crypto that was “essentially worthless.” The suit, filed in Denver District Court, alleged that the couple spent around $1.3 million—nearly 40% of the funds they raised—on personal expenses. Purchases included high-end vacations, designer clothing, jewelry, cosmetic dental work, a Range Rover, an au pair, and extensive home renovations. In her lawsuit, Chan contended that the couple’s “drive to make money was only matched by their reckless disregard of securities laws and profound lack of scruples towards their investors.” Then, in July 2025, Denver’s district attorney charged the Regalados with 40 felonies, including theft, racketeering, and securities fraud. If convicted, they could face decades in prison. But the couple maintain that they haven’t done anything wrong and were simply carrying