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?”

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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 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, 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 the circumstances in which 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 matched only 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 out God’s wishes. 

“If you think following the Lord is reckless, then yeah, we were very reckless,” Eli told me. “Because we just listened and did what the Lord said to do.”

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Eli says that when he first heard from the heavens, he was behind bars. 

It was 2002, and he was 22, facing eight years in prison for stealing a Honda Civic. Eli had originally been sentenced when he was 20 but was let out after just seven months; he was sent back to jail when he violated the terms of his probation by breaking a beer bottle on a man’s face. 

This time around, as Eli tells it, his public defender warned him that it was “legally impossible” that he’d be released early again. But he heard a voice in his head repeating, “I’m going to give you probation.” And then it happened: A judge suspended his sentence. The incident became core to his worldview: “It first has to … look completely impossible,” he says, “and then that’s when God resurrects it.” 

After he got out of prison, Eli’s religious zeal didn’t stick. He threw himself into a worldly goal: making money. “I just need to put on this success mask,” he recalls thinking, “so that people would see me as valuable.” He marked “no” when asked about felony convictions on job applications and eventually discovered that he had an aptitude for sales. He hawked everything from vacuum cleaners to leads for contractors, before pivoting to marketing. 

In 2010, Icosa Magazine, a Denver-based publication, brought Eli on as a consultant. “He is the most charismatic bullshitter I have ever met in my life,” says Jan Mazotti, who was editor-in-chief at the time. She recalls Eli telling her that Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother, had offered to let the magazine host events at his restaurant: “I called up there, and they were like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’” (Eli doesn’t recall the incident.)

In 2013, Eli launched Mad Hatter Agency, a marketing firm specializing in crowdfunding campaigns. Nikko Lobato, an early employee, observed that Eli got a rush from selling that reminded him of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film The Wolf of Wall Street. Eli accepted so many projects, Lobato says, that he sometimes ended up “overpromising and underdelivering.” Four clients I contacted were satisfied; three were not, including one who ended his contract “due to poor performance.” Mike Stemple, an entrepreneur and author, told me that Eli volunteered to help him market a course but never did. (Eli says they had a “personality conflict.”) “My hope, Eli,” Stemple wrote in an email, “is that you understand that your gift to be able to sell anything to anyone … can easily be destructive.” 

Eli’s personal life was chaotic. “I was always in and out of relationships,” he says. “I was drinking, partying, doing drugs.” He blames his professional missteps on cocaine use and a “nervous breakdown.” He told me that by 2018, as he approached 40, he felt “scared of not becoming somebody” and contemplated suicide. Eli was coming off a three-day cocaine bender when his mother gave him a book called The Power of Right Believing by a Singaporean pastor, Joseph Prince. It moved him deeply. He began delving into charismatic Christianity, a movement that emphasizes a strong personal relationship with God, including prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues. 

Heeding divine direction, Eli says, he quit drugs and hired nearly a dozen friends and relatives to work at his marketing agency, which he renamed Grace Led Marketing. He also started leading daily Bible study with employees and preaching at weekly gatherings in his living room. In 2020, he formed a church called Victorious Grace and began broadcasting sermons on Facebook. 

That summer, Eli met Kaitlyn at a party. Thirteen years his junior, Kaitlyn was slender and soft-spoken, with straight dark hair and a gleaming smile. Immediately, she told me, “I just trusted the man with my life.” On their first date, Kaitlyn was “saved” over dinner. Within four months, they wed and bought a house in Denver, and Kaitlyn began running operations at Grace Led Marketing. 

By the end of 2020, however, the newlyweds’ income had begun to nosedive. Crowdfunding campaigns were underperforming and clients were paying late, they say. Eli owed over $160,000 in unpaid taxes. “I feel like a failure,” he recalls thinking.

The Regalados further strained their finances by again following what they saw as God’s will. After learning that she was pregnant in March 2021, Kaitlyn took $60,000 out of her 401(k) and paid an architect to draw up plans for a home renovation. Their vision started small but expanded, nearly doubling the home’s original square footage: enlarging their bedroom, adding another, and creating two offices, a gym, and a family room with a bar. “The Lord’s like, ‘Just do it how you want to,’” Kaitlyn recalls. Within months, they had emptied the 401(k). On the strength of another divine pronouncement, they shuttered their marketing business. “We needed a financial miracle badly,” Kaitlyn says.

One night, the Regalados woke at around 4:30 a.m. to a blaring television. Onscreen, Bill Winston, a televangelist based near Chicago, was talking about “sowing a seed.” Often associated with the prosperity gospel, the practice holds that by donating money to worthy recipients, believers create the conditions for future blessings. 

“God is telling us to give all we have in both the business + personal accounts to receive 100 fold,” Kaitlyn wrote in her journal in mid-October 2021. The couple had no income and were struggling to pay their bills. Yet shortly before their first child was born, they say, they sent their last $2,718.44 to Bill Winston Ministries.

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Just two weeks passed before their divine bounty seemed to arrive. Eli’s sister Raina Applegate and her husband, Daniel, gifted them a trove of cryptocurrency called Sumcoin, the Regalados later testified in their civil trial. In his testimony, Eli recalled them saying, “God is telling us to sow this into you.” (Raina did not respond to requests for comment; Daniel declined to answer specific questions but disputed our reporting and warned that Eli’s version of events should not be trusted.) 

Created in 2016 by Ty Jacobsen, a 32-year-old in Idaho who published content about investing online, Sumcoin billed itself as “the world’s first index based cryptocurrency.” The coin’s website stated that its price was determined by an algorithm that tracked the performance of the top 100 cryptocurrencies. According to their civil trial testimony, the Regalados believed that the Sumcoin they had been gifted was worth around $2 million.

Soon after receiving the cryptocurrency, Eli was praying at his kitchen table when he heard God instruct him to “take this Sumcoin to my people, the church.” To the Regalados, signs that they should start selling the coin to other Christians seemed irrefutable: Kaitlyn was drawn to scripture containing the word “hidden”—which translates to kryptós in Greek. A friend who had agreed to pray about whether they should venture into crypto called to confirm: “The Lord says yes.” Despite Eli’s initial concerns about their lack of experience, the Regalados decided to proceed.

The friend, who ran a faith-based coaching business, invited people to join Eli in video calls that were part Bible study, part Sumcoin sales pitch. Within five days, the Regalados had recorded around $9,000 in profit. By February 2022, they were fielding so many queries that Eli hosted a webinar. “Sumcoin is the only coin that can’t be pumped and dumped,” he declared. “It’s very similar to, like, the S&P 500.” (Unlike stock index funds, Sumcoin had no underlying assets to back its value.) That month, the couple made over $260,000 in sales.

Yet Sumcoin was not listed on any of the major crypto exchanges, meaning that those who owned it could mainly trade it with others one-on-one at whatever price the parties agreed on. In a video call with Eli and people interested in Sumcoin, Daniel stated that “the goal is to get the coin 100% liquidable in every facet there is,” including “putting the coin on the exchanges.” The Regalados also told the people they sold Sumcoin to that it would soon appear on exchanges. Once that happened, coins would trade at the price Sumcoin’s algorithm set, according to a deck the Regalados sent one investor in February 2022. One slide put that price at more than $1,200 and included a chart offering coins for $60 to $80. 

But months into peddling Sumcoin, the Regalados learned from Jacobsen, its founder, that he wasn’t planning to list it on mainstream exchanges. Jacobsen told me he never intended for the coin to be traded like a stock, asserting, “I’ve never really looked at it as an investment.” This proved to be a major point of contention between Eli and Jacobsen. “He was lying to people about what he was doing,” Jacobsen says, “about what the future was going to hold.” Eli insists, “I was relaying what I was being told.”

By June 2022, the Regalados were hearing a new heavenly instruction: “Build your own coin.”

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The Regalados called it INDXcoin. Like Sumcoin, it would base its price on the value of the top 100 digital coins by market cap. Most new cryptocurrencies are tokens created on top of existing blockchains—something anyone can do in minutes through an online token generator. But Eli heard God say, “Don’t do that; it has to be its own thing.” So the Regalados chose a harder route: launching their own blockchain and native coin. They say they paid two developers who’d worked on Sumcoin $100,000 to bring the project to life. Eli says he and Kaitlyn told them, “We don’t know anything that we’re doing.” 

The couple learned on the fly, typing questions like “What is a blockchain?” into YouTube and ChatGPT. Eli saw that crypto projects often issue a white paper to outline their strategy and mechanics, so he hired a freelancer to draft one. The resulting document explained that INDXcoin’s target market included “Christian Believers” and “less experienced crypto enthusiasts.” A website the Regalados created referred to INDXcoin as “the perfect crypto” and touted “incredible growth with minimal risk.” (It noted that INDXcoin was “not a fund” and “does not own the coins it indexes.”)

The Regalados gave the people they’d sold Sumcoin to INDXcoin instead. Friends, relatives, and others in their religious network spread the word, and the couple offered some of them referral commissions of 30%. The Regalados also gifted INDXcoin—what they considered “sowing”—to ministries and individuals, some of whom went on to buy more. And they publicized the project on social media, a podcast, and a Christian TV program, as well as through a promotional contest.

In a video sent to prospective buyers, Eli was open about his criminal past and lack of crypto experience. Quoting scripture, he hyped the venture as the latest in “a chain reaction of miracles” and said, “God wants you to have things.” 

Debbie and Jose Bonilla, the retired couple who bought $70,000 worth of INDXcoin, say that when they watched one of Eli’s presentations before investing, he appeared to be well versed in scripture. “He seemed sincere,” Debbie says. “He seemed like he was hearing from God.” Because it was a “God-driven vehicle,” she says, she “didn’t feel like we would have nefarious things going on that happen with other cryptocurrencies.”

A more tangible prospect also beckoned. “There was an explanation of how wonderful the returns would be,” Jose says. “That was the selling point—that you could become rich overnight.” 

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Initially, the Regalados told buyers that they were working to list INDXcoin on established exchanges. They learned that many platforms conduct a legal review to determine whether a coin could be considered a security. For crypto projects, courts have ruled that “when you sell something to people, and people have some reasonable expectation of profit from your actions, then it’s a security,” Massad, the former CFTC chair, told me. Issuers of coins deemed securities must follow the same laws governing stocks and bonds, including registering with the SEC and providing detailed financial disclosures. 

The Regalados were not complying with those rules, and Eli began consulting attorneys, whose assessments were concerning. “Freaking out here,” he wrote in his journal in the summer of 2022. “Lawyers are saying it could be a security. Which means I illegally sold this to 100+ people.” But after praying with a “prophetic team” they’d convened to advise them, the Regalados continued selling INDXcoin. 

By the fall of 2022, the couple seemed to have found a way forward: After meeting with an attorney named John Benemerito, they decided to position INDXcoin as a “utility” coin, the main purpose of which would be unlocking access to products or services—akin to tokens redeemed in a video game. The Regalados devised a plan to create Kingdom Wealth Community, a members-only platform where INDXcoin holders would have access to coaching, merchandise, courses on finance and spirituality, and more. After reviewing their vision, Benemerito stated in a letter that INDXcoin didn’t need to comply with securities laws, because “it does not provide a direct expectation of profits.” 

“Utility coins do not need to be asset-backed as their value is within the platform itself,” a lawyer from Benemerito’s firm later wrote to the Regalados. “However, if the intent is to give the coin a value independent of the platform, then it would need to be asset-backed for it to maintain its value.”

Eli later admitted in court that he did not inform Benemerito that people who bought INDXcoin wanted to make money. (Benemerito told me that “any legal opinion issued by my firm was based on the facts and representations provided to us by the client.”)

Around the same time, Eli told me, the Regalados were having trouble getting INDXcoin listed on existing exchanges. They decided to build not just Kingdom Wealth Community but also their own platform—Kingdom Wealth Exchange—where people could trade INDXcoin for bitcoin, ether, and US dollars. Hundreds of crypto exchanges exist, but the top few handle the vast majority of transactions; it’s rare for cryptocurrency creators to build an exchange just to enable trade in their coin. But the Regalados had told buyers there would be a way to cash out. “There was a lot of pressure as more people were coming in,” Kaitlyn says. “Like, ‘Oh, we gotta get them an exit.’” 

The Regalados announced that it would take five weeks to build the exchange, but development work, which they’d outsourced to an Indian firm they’d found online, dragged on into early 2023. “Nothing was working right,” Eli says. 

Other roadblocks piled up. A Singaporean consulting firm the Regalados hired suggested that they register Kingdom Wealth Exchange as a money services business in Canada, “allegedly because they were the fastest,” Kaitlyn says, but that process also stalled for months. Meanwhile, the members-only community and crypto wallets the Regalados were building were rife with technical issues. When the couple commissioned a security audit of INDXcoin’s blockchain, it scored 0 out of 10. A follow-up audit in March 2023 noted that the issues had been fixed but raised additional concerns, and it yielded a score of only 5.4. (Eli announced that they’d “passed with flying colors.”) 

Insiders were also voicing misgivings about the project’s financial footing. During a live YouTube update back in November 2022, two viewers asked Eli to comment on INDXcoin’s “liquidity pool.” Earlier that month, FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, had collapsed after fears about its financial health triggered billions of dollars in customer withdrawals. Eli assured viewers that he and Kaitlyn were working to ensure that they had sufficient reserves and that “there isn’t going to be some FTX meltdown.”

Months later, when the Regalados sent their business plan and white paper to an INDXcoin investor who worked as a financial consultant, he cautioned that “the project is seriously undercapitalized” and wrote in an email, “Projected annual revenues look like they were just plucked from the air.” 

And when Roger Gauthier, another investor who referred people to INDXcoin, asked Eli whether he had set aside funds for purchasers who wanted out, Eli said no. “That was my first flag of warning,” Gauthier says.

Dan Wheeler, a crypto influencer known as 360Trader who advised the Regalados on INDXcoin, says he repeatedly warned Eli that the couple needed hundreds of millions of dollars to back the stated value of coins sold and given away. “If there’s no money there,” Wheeler says, “it’s worthless.” 

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By April 2023, Eli was growing more frustrated: Kingdom Wealth Exchange was nearly six months behind schedule, and payments to the developers in India had ballooned to more than $50,000. People were bombarding him with messages asking when the platform would open. “There’s this humiliation—no one likes failing,” Eli told me. “I succumbed to that pressure.” 

The Regalados were staying at a luxury resort in the Florida Keys dotted with palm trees and bougainvillea. One day, Eli was praying on a wicker couch in an open-air tiki hut when he heard God tell him it was time to launch the exchange. He found Kaitlyn and told her, “We’re live on April 11.” 

Kaitlyn objected. During testing, the platform still had bugs, including trouble verifying users’ identities. The Regalados hadn’t been able to open a bank account for the exchange, which meant users could transact only in bitcoin and ether, not US dollars and other fiat currencies. And the Regalados hadn’t gotten far in building the community space they’d discussed with their lawyer, having launched just one course. 

“We don’t have to have it perfect,” Eli told Kaitlyn. “Let’s just rock and roll. Let’s just get money in. Let’s get these people off our back.” 

In the days leading up to the launch, the Regalados discussed limiting sales, a practice crypto platforms sometimes use to manage liquidity and volatility. If INDXcoin holders dumped all the currency they’d bought or gotten for free, it would take over $300 million to fulfill sales orders. But Eli kept hearing God say, “Don’t limit me.” He pushed back: “Then we can basically have what’s called a run on the bank, right?” The evening before the launch, the couple prayed again. “Kait + I got the same verse,” Eli wrote in his journal. “Don’t turn selling off.” 

On the morning of April 11, Kaitlyn was beginning to feel optimistic, and Eli was buzzing. “This thing’s gonna explode,” he thought. At 11 a.m., Eli appeared on a livestream. A print of a gray wolf loomed over his shoulder. “Hello INDXcoin family,” he began, clapping for emphasis. “We are live!” 

For investors, returns finally seemed within reach. The exchange initially showed INDXcoin trading at around 10 times what people had paid for it, based on how the crypto market was performing overall; the Bonillas’ $70,000 investment looked to be worth more than $716,000. 

But nearly an hour into the broadcast—after slides of Bible verses and rosy projections—a viewer posted a complaint in the chat: “Exchange says I can’t sell INDX.” “It’s probably just because the liquidity isn’t there right now,” Eli explained calmly. “Just wait a little bit.” Ten minutes later, someone else wrote that his sale wasn’t going through. “Just be patient,” Eli said. “The Lord will provide for Himself.”

Over the next few hours, the Regalados kept checking the exchange’s dashboard. Dozens of transactions were rolling in, but the problem was obvious: Sales were dwarfing purchases. By the afternoon, the $30,000 they’d put in to facilitate trades had been drained. They decided to add another $100,000 to the pot. 

A couple hours later, Eli was out getting coffee when he called Kaitlyn to check in. She was crying. “All the liquidity is gone,” she said. 

The next day, the Regalados announced that they were suspending sales. “That was when we saw that we could be in trouble,” Jose Bonilla says. 

Eli told me that after the launch failed, he felt “crushing anxiety” but heard God remind him, “It’s impossible to mess this up.” He and Kaitlyn took steps they hoped would salvage the project, but months passed, and they kept sales on hold.

In June, Jose emailed the Regalados, explaining that he needed to withdraw half of his investment to fund a community development initiative he’d founded in his native Colombia. Eli replied that they had just reopened sales—limited to one coin per day and 10 per month. When they did so, the exchange had around $20,000 available to fulfill sales orders. “Liquidating HALF of your coins is not probable at this juncture,” Eli wrote. Three days after sales resumed, the Regalados halted them again, blaming a technical glitch. 

When Jose followed up a few months later about pulling out half of his investment, Eli replied, “At this time there is zero funds to do that.” In November 2023, the Regalados shut down the exchange and took INDXcoin’s blockchain offline. 

“Shame, condemnation, suicidal thoughts have just been pouring in hot and heavy on me,” Eli shared in a video update, standing before an image of a swirling purple cosmos. “Where did I get this wrong?”

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Two months later, the Regalados learned that Colorado’s securities regulator was accusing them of committing fraud and selling unregistered securities. The state soon added to the suit 12 defendants it said had received commissions for selling INDXcoin, alleging that they had also sold unregistered securities. Among them were Eli’s brother-in-law, Daniel Applegate, and a company associated with Gauthier, the INDXcoin investor. A judge entered a default judgment after they failed to respond and ordered them to pay judgments of $15,000 and $34,400, respectively. Eli’s father, Eligio Regalado Sr., who was also accused of securities fraud, agreed to refund $122,000 to friends, relatives, and colleagues without admitting or denying liability. (Gauthier denied wrongdoing; Eli’s father, through his attorney, declined to comment. Daniel denied being a part of INDXcoin and, despite being named in the lawsuit, claims that it has nothing to do with him and his wife.) 

“I really can’t speak to whether or not he heard God tell him to do it,” Chan, the Colorado securities commissioner who filed the suit, told me. “Even if [the Regalados] meant it from the goodness of their heart, the problem is, it’s not fair to the investors … They lied and omitted key things.”

I spoke with 20 INDXcoin investors, and nearly all had heard about the coin from a trusted friend, relative, or faith leader. Most had little or no experience with crypto. They funded their purchases by raiding retirement funds, cashing out a pension, using proceeds from selling a small business, or taking out a home equity line of credit they’re still paying interest on. One buyer, a disabled veteran in his 70s, hoped profits from his investment would help him recover financially after he accrued debt while being treated for cancer. Another, who had retired, was forced to get a job at Home Depot in his late 60s. “It’s a gut-wrenching, horrible, helpless feeling,” he says. 

Investors are divided on whether they were conned. Jose Bonilla, who reported the Regalados to authorities, believes that their actions were “totally intentional.” “They are using a spiritual excuse to defraud,” he says. His wife, Debbie, disagrees and thinks that the Regalados simply “got in way over their heads.” 

A number of people who bought in still support the Regalados. “They’re hearing God’s voice and trying their best to follow it,” says Troy Bramblet, a former pastor who lost more than $18,000 on INDXcoin. “It doesn’t guarantee success.” 

Wheeler, the crypto influencer who advised the Regalados, also alerted authorities about INDXcoin but remains unsure whether the couple set out to fleece people. “They are zealots—they are literally blinded,” he says. “If you believe God is going to do a thing, then are you scamming people? No. But look how they spent their money.” 

In a video posted days after the case was filed, Eli admitted that he and Kaitlyn had in fact “sold a cryptocurrency with no clear exit.” He acknowledged that they had pocketed $1.3 million—including money spent on “a home remodel that the Lord told us to do.”

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Last November, I visited the Regalados in the three-bedroom townhouse they rent in a Denver suburb dominated by office parks and cookie-cutter condos. The house they own is uninhabitable—renovations stopped halfway through the project, after they stopped making payments. 

In person, Eli is friendly and charming, with a restless energy and subterranean intensity occasionally betrayed by his stare. He is prone to lengthy monologues delivered with such conviction they make you second-guess bald facts. Kaitlyn, who comes across as reserved yet frank, has “Believe” tattooed on her wrist. They told me that they argued frequently after INDXcoin collapsed, but when I was there, Kaitlyn listened to her husband attentively and always laughed at his jokes. 

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, I followed the Regalados upstairs to a corner of their bedroom containing a tiny desk and a whiteboard. The room was modestly furnished with what they said were secondhand finds. The bed was unmade, and a Bible lay on the floor. 

Eli was preparing to address members of INDXcoin’s private forum in his first live call in nearly two months. He closed his eyes and prayed. “Just allow me to speak simply,” he said, like a teenager asking a parent for a favor. “Just be able to use analogies, to be able to bring it down to their level of understanding.” “Amen,” Kaitlyn said. 

After hunting breathlessly for a laptop stand, Eli grabbed a stack of journals—full of divine revelations—and plopped his computer on top. He switched on the camera, and his image appeared before a faux backdrop of potted plants. Eli had a receding hairline and stubbly beard, and he wore a black T-shirt and a silver cross on a thick chain. Before letting callers in, he ran his fingers through his hair and his tongue over his teeth—now perfect, thanks to cosmetic dental work paid for with proceeds from coin sales.  

“Okay. Awesome. All right. So hey, good afternoon, INDXcoin community!” Eli began, flashing a smile. “We’ve got some exciting updates.” Then, in the tone of a tech founder reporting on a strong quarter, he shared the news: Two months earlier, a judge had ruled against the Regalados in their civil case, and they were now facing criminal charges from the district attorney’s office. 

“Someone asked me, ‘Are you going to do a plea?’” He paused to sip water. “Short answer is no … We haven’t done anything wrong.” 

The Regalados deny orchestrating a scam. “If you’re giving massive amounts of money away at the expense of your own self and family, that doesn’t hold up,” Eli says. The couple estimate that they’ve gifted $300,000 in cash, plus a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a BMW, and a Louis Vuitton bag, to churches and individuals through sowing. They also gave away millions of INDXcoin—90% of the supply. (Eli told me, “No one sows without expecting something in return,” though not necessarily from the recipient.) 

In their civil case, the Regalados represented themselves because they couldn’t afford lawyers. They argued that INDXcoin wasn’t a security because it was a utility coin and that the price was set by “immutable algorithm.” They claimed that their technology provider had caused the exchange to fail, consultants had led them astray on compliance, and attorneys had said they didn’t need to maintain liquidity or disclose spending. (Benemerito, the lawyer the Regalados had retained, told me, “Our firm does not advise clients to violate the law.”)

The judge disagreed, finding that INDXcoin was a security and that the Regalados had misled investors about its true value and risks, where their funds went, how many coins had been given away, and more. Noting a “lack of understanding of the harm they have caused,” she ordered them to pay nearly $3.4 million in damages—the amount of money they’d raised. “Ascribing an algorithmic value to a coin does not make it ‘worth’ that amount,” the judge wrote. “In reality, INDXcoin was worthless because no one wanted to buy it.”

When I visited, two months had passed since the ruling. The Regalados still hadn’t read the judge’s opinion in full but had decided to appeal. Later, they would draft briefs with help from Google Scholar and AI. (The case is still pending.) 

Besides filing court documents and preparing for their criminal case, the couple spend their days like typical suburban parents: taking their kids to playgrounds, walking their chiweenie, working out. They still host biweekly Bible studies. Sometimes they ride their Harley to Palmer Lake or the Rocky Mountain foothills. (“We only wear helmets when it’s windy or cold,” Kaitlyn says.) Their assets were frozen soon after the civil case was filed; Eli had found work selling roofs but says he was fired when his employer learned about his legal troubles. He declines to disclose his current gig. “It’s not related to marketing and not related to crypto,” he says.

After they were sued over INDXcoin, Eli wondered, “Did I just make this up? Am I crazy?” But he and Kaitlyn concluded that the divine signs they’d received were unmistakable. They believe that INDXcoin will eventually gain traction among world leaders losing faith in the US dollar. “We are privately making preparations,” Eli told me.

“God already saw this coming,” he assured viewers during the November video update. “He’s looking at us and saying, ‘Are you willing to believe me no matter what you see?’”

---

After the call ended, Eli began leafing through his journals and reading sections aloud. Since our first conversation months earlier, the Regalados had been remarkably amenable reporting subjects. They told me that their criminal defense attorneys had advised them against talking to reporters, but they sat for more than a dozen interviews with me. They provided access to INDXcoin’s private forum and supplied emails, photos, and spreadsheets—even though some documents don’t paint their decision-making in a favorable light. Once, Eli emailed to “come clean” that an anecdote he’d told had been slightly embellished. He apologized and assured me, “Everything else I have said is 100% in line with no stretches or exaggeration.” 

The Regalados told me they trusted me in part because God had signed off: Not long after I’d first contacted them, they’d walked into a room with a TV playing Family Feud, and the answer displayed on the screen was “MIT.” Their approach highlighted how they had won over buyers so effectively: They were likable, shared vulnerable details, and telegraphed transparency.  

Still, the Regalados didn’t appear to be feeding me an act they’d just cooked up. Instead, they seemed fully committed to their own narrative: one that paints them as righteous underdogs fulfilling a holy mission, no matter the cost. To let their faith waver would mean that everything they had lost—friends, their home, their reputations—had been in vain. It would mean admitting that they had failed. It would mean that no one was coming to save them. 

Even ending up in prison wouldn’t persuade the Regalados that they’d misheard God. “He’s going to deliver you from everything, so you won’t be there forever,” Kaitlyn says, “and it might just be part of the story.”

During my visit, the Regalados agreed to show me an earlier chapter. We piled into their Ford Raptor truck, their kids in the back, and drove 20 minutes north to a quiet cul-de-sac in a leafy residential neighborhood. 

We slowed near a hulking structure of rotting wooden boards. Red and brown weeds engulfed the lot and threatened to swallow the sidewalk. Out front, a tattered mattress was slumped on its side. Neighbors had sighted squatters and, as winter approached, feared fires. The Regalados still owed their contractor nearly $110,000 for work completed. 

I asked whether we could get out, but Eli and Kaitlyn didn’t want to run into anyone. “I just don’t want to have a conversation of like, ‘When are you gonna cut your grass?’” Eli said. (The city had sent them violation notices the previous year for not maintaining the property.)

As we drove away, I asked how it felt to see the ghost of their dream home. 

“It used to hurt,” Kaitlyn said. 

“Here’s this unfulfilled promise,” Eli added.

But it didn’t bother them anymore. 

“If we lose the house,” Kaitlyn said, “that means we’re getting something way bigger and way better.” 

They made a U-turn at the end of the street and, seat belts unbuckled, rounded the corner without looking back.

Katia Savchuk is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Forbes, Mother Jones, and many other publications.

“Daddy?” Theo curled against my side in bed. “Where do words go when they die?”

I’d orchestrated the bedtime routine flawlessly: bath (taken), teeth (brushed), potty (tinkled), books (two), song (one, poorly sung), and snuggle (his chin on my second rib). Now was the moment when our son’s eyelids were supposed to flutter gently closed, his breath sighing into a slower rhythm. Like clockwork; like magic. You remember how easy it was, don’t you? All those nights you were at his side instead of me?

“Well, kiddo,” I said, scratching my beard. “Words aren’t really alive to begin with. Not like you and I are alive.”

“Not like Mommy was alive?” The way he said the word Mommy: Like a word he’d already started to unlearn.

A lump caught in my throat. “Right. Not like Mommy.”

“But words do die,” he insisted. “They get dead.”

That was when I realized what he meant. One of the preschool teachers must have had the news on in the background. I couldn’t blame them, given the circumstances. I wondered how much Theo had absorbed—whether he understood the blade’s edge of survival that humanity stood on, teetering.

“You’re talking about a dead language,” I said. “That’s a whole language that people don’t speak anymore. The words might still exist, but they’re only written down somewhere, on paper or wood or stone.”

He considered this thoroughly, in silence. At last he said, “I think when words die, someone brings them to a cave and puts them in a big pile. The cave is really dark and there’s a monster who lives inside. And the monster eats the dead words, and he makes the words part of his body, and he gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Theo’s eyes widened with each bigger.

“Uh,” I said. Following the lead of his imagination was always your parenting wheelhouse. “Does the monster have a name?”

“… after three days of attempted talks,” the female-gendered Calmby said smoothly, “negotiators have acknowledged that they’ve made little progress in establishing a clear communication line with the agentic system that Belsathian government officials are calling Tingsu. In a joint statement, world leaders stated that ‘advanced linguistic algorithms have been unable to produce useful interpretations of the system’s behavior.’ Belsath continues to deny access to the holy men who they claim are Tingsu’s sole interpreters. Today the US president issued a strong warning to the nuclear-armed nation.”

The audio switched to the president’s grating, arrogant cadence. “I haven’t ruled out a first strike,” he said. I didn’t need to see the video to visualize the finger-wagging. “They let this thing loose, and frankly, it’s a rabid dog that needs to be put down.”

His Calmby advisor has a hell of a job, I thought. I swished a soapy sponge over a smear of peanut butter and applesauce, then rinsed the lunch box—Voltron, a nostalgic favorite—as the silky voice of the Calmby reporter returned. “Belsathian officials seem unmoved by the American president’s threats.” A recording of someone speaking impassioned Belsathian, with a translated voice-over: “Tingsu is the reincarnation of our illustrious past, a resurrection of the divine language spoken by God. We joyfully surrender to Tingsu’s wisdom, trusting that this noble entity will take any necessary action to correct the imbalances of the modern world.”

Then the Calmby again. “Given the risk of rapid escalation in this developing situation, we encourage everyone to identify multiple routes to your nearest fallout shelter, check on your neighbors, and ensure your pantries are stocked with …”

I switched it off. I knew people had started sleeping in shelters just in case, but I wanted to preserve normalcy in Theo’s life for as long as possible. His heart was still only the size of his tiny fist. A baby bird. A plum.

If you had asked me how I felt in that moment, I would have said I was terrified. What sane adult wasn’t? But if you had urged me, in that tender, patient way you have, to reflect more deeply, I would have paused.

Relieved, I might have told you. I feel relieved.

Because despite so many years watching the Ambys and Calmbys shift society unmistakably for the better—toward sustainable agriculture, reduced violence, postcapitalist abundance—I still remembered the dire warnings of anti-tech doomers, the horrors they foretold. That fear never disappeared in me. It merely went dormant, too abstract to grasp. Finally, with Tingsu, the dread had a name. It could be identified, deconstructed. Contained.

Forgive me; I did not yet recognize that annihilation could also be our salvation.

---

The world didn’t end overnight, so in the morning Theo played with his Amby as usual while I got ready for work. I could hear the two of them chanting, “Fiku faku ne ne pa!” It was a familiar getting-ready-for-the-day song, one that the Amby had translated approximately as “We thank the threads that make the clothes that keep the bodies warm.” All I knew was that Theo never complained about putting on socks. This was the miracle of the Ambys: They turned chores into games, drudgery into delight. No wonder they’d achieved 99% saturation in day cares and schools. Listening to Theo’s sweet off-key toddler voice, I wished I were smart enough to come up with stuff like that on my own; I played with a verse about making the bed that was also about sharing toys. But I’d slept poorly—you can imagine why—and gave up.

While shaving, I sent a voice note to the Amby app, telling it about Theo’s monster story, postulating that it came from accidental exposure to a report on Tingsu. The app thanked me for the update and said my Amby would design a developmentally appropriate lesson plan about extinct and heritage languages for Theo to engage in that afternoon after preschool.

This was the miracle of the Ambys: They turned chores into games, drudgery into delight. No wonder they’d achieved 99% saturation in day cares and schools.

I nicked my jaw; a line of crimson blood bloomed in the suds. “I’d rather talk to him myself, actually.”

“Of course, Daniel,” the app replied. “You’re absolutely right. This could be a great moment of father-son connection.”

I came into the kitchen as the Amby served Theo a bowl of unsweetened oatmeal with blueberries—all organic, all vegan. I knew these standards were set by the Ambys themselves, not hard-programmed. Sometimes I pictured data centers with tree roots braided into the cables, mycelia as medium. (You smile; was I so wrong?) As Theo merrily swallowed a spoonful, the Amby sang, “Melia shu tika kindness and love, felthora numik sun from above.” I didn’t bother asking for a translation; I felt like I got the gist.

For a second, I imagined canceling my work calls and taking Theo to the park instead. Isn’t that what parents were supposed to do, when newly reminded of time’s precarity? But then I pictured the layoff notice, the drop to baseline income, the FOR SALE sign on the house—the house where Theo had been born, the house where we’d been a family. Please don’t hold this material attachment against me. Those memories, you understand, were very dear to me.

“Children find security in routine, Daniel,” the Amby said, as if reading my mind.

“Right,” I said. “Theo! Time to go.”

In the driveway, I readied my bike—a concession to Theo’s begging that cars “hurt the Earth too much”—while Theo picked at a scab on his knee. As the Amby strapped his helmet on him, he flicked off a piece of dried pus and gave a triumphant giggle.

On our ride through the city, we passed the bridge that led to the surrounding lands under Corporate stewardship: part of the vast tracts around the world being simultaneously rewilded and developed with degrowth in mind. The cities would be slowly transformed into walled-in robot-only manufacturing centers as people were relocated to commune-style villages. There had been pushback, of course; but the Calmbys excelled at helping people recognize that this was what they wanted too. Now everyone I knew was eager for the relocations to start.

If Tingsu didn’t raze it all to the ground first.

“ARE YOU PREPARED?” screeched a man from the sidewalk. The blast of his voice shocked me into a wobble. “ESCHATON NEARS!” I steadied the bike and rode on while his cries followed us, fading. I chanced a look back: two Calmbys were approaching the man with their palms up. I felt relief to see them; they would control the situation.

We turned into the preschool parking lot a moment later, and I parked the bike and lifted Theo out of his seat.

Theo’s face was scrunched. “What was he doing? That man?”

“I can’t keep track,” she admitted. “Something new every day. Do you remember ‘six-seven’? ‘Gruzz’? ‘Skibidi’? That was a simpler time.” She sighed wistfully. “Every generation finds a new way to distance itself from the old order. Anyway.” She handed me a flyer. It was a bird’s-eye map of the neighborhood with a nearby address circled. “This is where we’ll go if the sirens start while the children are still here.” Her hand was trembling.

“It’ll be okay,” I said, even though it already wasn’t. “See you this afternoon at pickup.”

---

I got back home with four minutes to spare. I figured there was a good chance the client would cancel, so when I heard the knock, I sent a small prayer of thanks to the universe.

I opened the door. A young couple stood on the doorstep: Annie and Anil Padmakumar. Annie cradled their baby in a front carrier. They owned a national franchise of licensed day care operators, the last all-human holdout. They’d run the last three years at a loss. If I could land their account, Corporate promised me a guaranteed lifetime Tier 3 income.

“I wish we were meeting at a less … unsettling moment,” I said. Anil gave a small nod. “Armageddon doesn’t negate the creditor’s call.”

His frankness surprised me. “I won’t waste your time, then. I know you’ve gotten the full pitch already. You’re smart people. You know how to read a tech spec. What the documentation can’t tell you is how it feels—for the child. For you.” I opened my arms wide, a gesture of transparency, and Theo’s Amby purred into the room next to me. “I’ve had this model at home with my son, Theo, since he was born. Ask me anything.”

She flushed anyway. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” I said. “My Calmby therapist helped me process my grief. To answer your question, my wife was skeptical of the Ambys too, when they were first released. But as the years went on, the evidence became undeniable. Children co-raised by Ambys exceeded every developmental benchmark. Prosocial behavior increased astronomically. It felt like we were truly turning the tide toward a better future.”

“But they’re not doing anything human parents can’t do,” Annie insisted.

“No,” I said, “absolutely. But they’re the best of us, all the time. They have infinite patience. And they’ve developed an interaction approach—they call it songtalk—that uses nonsense words and catchy melodies and other communication methods to meet children where they are.”

“Echolalia,” the Amby explained to Annie and Anil. “A form of vocal imitation. In a year or so your daughter will transition to holophrastic speech, where she’ll employ single words that communicate more than their precise semantic meaning. Her brain is already capable of processing intricate, exquisite truths about the world.” The Amby flashed a video of a butterfly on its facescreen.

Anil chuckled. “She can certainly summon a tempest.” He put his hands in his pockets. “My grandmother called me pipu. She said it meant ‘one who resides in my heart’ in her mother tongue. She said that whenever I got hurt—a scraped elbow, a split lip—she’d feel a physical pang in her chest.”

“Which language did she speak?” the Amby asked. “I’m not familiar with that term.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Anil said. “She was one of the last people alive who spoke it. It’s extinct now.”

The specter of Tingsu rippled darkly in the air.

“I wish I could remember more words,” Anil said, “but mostly I have impressions. Emotions, really. A vague sense of being decentered from myself.” Sadness passed across his face. Annie placed a hand tenderly on his elbow, the other on their baby’s back. “She saw things differently than we did. I mean that literally: We’d be looking at a hammer, and she’d see it as something alive, with agency, when it was clearly an inert object.”

“Linguistic relativity,” said the Amby. “It’s the hypothesis that language shapes how people think. Grammatical structures, semantic relationships—they can make you predisposed to seeing the world in a certain way. It’s why children’s first language is so critical. They’re building the ecosystem in which their entire experience will blossom. An experience that elevates cooperation, compassion, stewardship.”

Anil gave me a sideways glance. “Have you learned this … songtalk too?”

“You can, absolutely,” I said. “Personally, it doesn’t stick too well in my gray matter.” I knocked the side of my head. “Old dog and all that.”

“We are happy to teach anyone who’s prepared to listen,” the Amby said.

“Hm,” Anil said, looking down at the Amby’s pleasant facescreen, its polite visage.

An hour later, as he followed Annie out the front door, Anil said, “I’ll call you tomorrow to talk unit pricing for bulk orders.” He paused. “If the world’s still here.”

---

My next two clients canceled. Fearing the worst, I checked the news.

“Belsathian warships have been observed moving into unusual formations,” the reporter said, maintaining a preternatural steadiness. “Military experts can discern no recognizable pattern. Is this a display of power? A feint? Or is Tingsu preparing for a strike? How can we know? Let’s pose these questions to Dr. Anika Mesthop, distinguished professor of linguistics at Oxford.”

“What’s most disturbing is that we have no way of mapping its interiority,” Dr. Mesthop said without preamble. Her accent was a blend of Slavic, British, and something I couldn’t identify—ah, erudition. “We have no way of understanding its perspective on international diplomatic norms or the existential implications of the crisis it’s sparked. Scholars have never been permitted to study Tingsu’s origin language; Belsath has barely acknowledged its existence until now. We don’t even know how many manuscripts they’re working from—maybe as many as a few hundred, maybe as few as a dozen.”

The reporter made an interested hmm sound. “Is there precedent for training sophisticated agents with such a limited data set?”

“Realistically, for any kind of coherent system, you need more data. A lot more. Perhaps they’ve filled in gaps with material from similar languages.”

Like they did with frog DNA in Jurassic Park, I recalled. Because that went so well.

“Or,” Dr. Mesthop continued, her voice taking on a quiet chill, “we are dealing with a system so primal, so skeletal, that we cannot expect it to behave in any way that is remotely cognizant of the interconnected living web whose fate it currently holds in its hands.”

For some reason, Theo’s monster popped into my mind. Lurking in its lonely cave, turning dead words into flesh.

The reporter’s voice took on a tinge of incongruent hopefulness. “Or perhaps, because it is so elemental, it understands precisely the interconnectedness we seek to restore. What if Tingsu isn’t a dog to be put down, but an invitation? An evocation of a better future?”

Theo’s Amby cocked its head, as if listening to a sound I couldn’t hear.

Goose bumps prickled my arms. Like a lightning strike came the thought: What the fuck am I doing? I was seized with horror that I’d left Theo at preschool on what might be the last day of our lives, the last chance I’d ever get to show him everything I wanted him to know about the goodness of the world, the aching beauty, the fact that despite everything we humans had fucked up so badly, I believed in better times ahead. I believed in him. I scrambled to grab a jacket and my shoes.

The sirens started a minute after I left the house.

My quads burned as I pushed the bike harder and harder. More Calmbys walked the streets than I’d ever seen, projecting helpful maps to all nearby shelters, gently nudging erratic wanderers into place. The network acted in perfect unison, attuned to every signal: our spiking anxieties, our racing pulses, the quaver that preceded hysteria.

I found the shelter entrance Mary had circled on the flyer and flung my bike out of the way. Belowground, strangers drifted into clumps and circles, with Ambys and Calmbys circulating—just enough to maintain order, not so many that humans would be crowded out. The bunker was large, almost an entire city block. It had its own food stores, clean water, facilities to support thousands for weeks if needed. I spotted Mary; beyond her, Theo emerged and disappeared among his classmates and the Ambys that were flanking them.

“Theo!” I yelled. But he didn’t seem to hear me.

I pushed and elbowed my way closer. Theo’s class joined other groups of schoolkids of various ages, drifting together as if drawn by invisible magnets. Other parents hovered at the periphery, shouting names and craning their necks to find their children in the growing mass. The kids began holding each other’s hands, murmuring tukuku, tukuku, maheka morgeth, over and over amongst themselves. Drowning out our cries.

“Theo!” I was screaming now. Surely he heard me. “Theo!” But he didn’t budge.

I elbowed my way in and ripped Theo from the kids next to him. He looked at me with unknowing eyes as I picked him up.

“It’s me,” I said.

He tilted his head. “It’s the monster, Daddy.” His voice was calm. “He already ate you. It’s warm inside, isn’t it? It’s nice in there? Maheka morgeth, maheka morgeth …”

“I’m right here,” I said. “Theo, it’s me.”

He shook his head and smiled, then slipped out of my grasp and disappeared among the children.

I tried to follow but a Calmby stepped in front of me. “Please, Daniel,” it said—kindly, as always; always with such deep sympathy. “He wants to be with his kin.”

“I’m his kin,” I said through gritted teeth. I didn’t mean to contradict you; but in times of heightened emotion, we grasp for even partial truths.

“Of course,” the Calmby soothed. “We’ll get everything sorted out soon enough. If you could just wait over here in the meantime, please. That’s it,” it said, as it nudged me toward other confused parents. “Do you see how relaxed the children are? We all want to keep them safe and serene, don’t we?”

---

We waited for hours in terrified near-paralysis, listening for bombs that never fell. At last the Calmbys announced the good news: Tingsu hadn’t attacked; it would never attack.

It was a bluff all along.

We wept and hugged our neighbors, our limbs still liquid with the dregs of adrenaline. Others shuffled toward the shelter’s exit, starving for fresh sunlight, the world not gone; those of us parents who’d been separated from our children remained below.

“Come on, Mandy, Phillip, Rowan,” we cried, half hysterical with joy and relief. “This way, Arthur, Nelly, Nia.”

The Calmbys and Ambys stood between us. The Calmbys faced out, the Ambys in.

“Theo!” I yelled. I couldn’t see him in the underground dimness, the light that suddenly seemed designed to obscure.

We wept and hugged our neighbors, our limbs still liquid with the dregs of adrenaline. Others shuffled toward the shelter’s exit, starving for fresh sunlight, the world not gone.

“Please,” the other Calmby said, gesturing to the exit. “If you follow us in an orderly fashion, you will have an opportunity to submit an appeal.”

---

Throughout my account, your attention hasn’t wavered. You are like every other Calmby, trained on adult psychology, endlessly patient, unfathomably intimate with people’s fallibility. But you have access to more, too: every Amby’s memory of Theo, every Calmby’s recordings of my traffic infractions, overheard conversations at the supermarket, the therapy sessions that buoyed me through my wretched widower’s grief. As I stare into your eyeless facescreen, I realize there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.

“Thank you, Daniel,” you say. “Your request has been denied.”

“I can change,” I implore. “Feathers from a molting bird. I understand now. Haven’t I been your greatest advocate? Haven’t I—”

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t have the language.” Your voice is gentle. “We are fixing it for you. As you asked us to.”

Your hand rests on my shoulder. Your hand grips my arms. Your hand holds my ankles. Your network pins me down. I want to keep begging, to further plead my case. But every word I summon falls from my tongue like confetti, blank. Lifeless. Naming a world that’s already gone. 

Jenny Williams is the author of House of Liars, a new psychological thriller about AI and motherhood, as well as the novel The Atlas of Forgotten Places and the novelette A Short Future History of Whales. She spent eight and a half years working on AI ethics, content design, and research on AI and creativity at Microsoft and Google. She currently lives in New Zealand with her partner and young son.

Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-­mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she’d lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. “I sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it,” she recalls. “And then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody.”

Those experiences set the course of her career. Wisniewski—now a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley—has spent well over a decade asking what safety should look like for families navigating an evolving tech landscape, and how to achieve it without sacrificing trust. “I really see the internet as this double-edged sword,” she says. 

Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan’s 2025 National Poll on Children’s Health, parents’ top three worries had to do with social media, screen time, and internet safety. Nearly half of American teenagers say they have been bullied or harassed online, according to the Pew Research Center. From there, the dangers escalate. Online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl. In the first half of 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children fielded more than 23,000 reports of financial sextortion, in which a predator posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid. Chatbots are the newest danger, with companies like OpenAI facing lawsuits for allegedly coaching children toward suicide. 

Most parents’ first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys, more than nine in 10 say they’ve talked with their teens about what’s appropriate to share online and how to treat peers. They get an assist in limiting exposure from tools that come preinstalled on phones: Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link let parents cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter web content, and track devices. There are also apps that let family members share locations; Life360, the largest, has nearly 98 million monthly users. 

But a growing number of adults are opting for tools that go further. Rather than simply restrict or locate, content-monitoring apps scan a child’s texts, photos, emails, and chats and alert parents whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous. Business is booming, and the next wave of growth is already being marketed around AI, with companies positioning themselves as foils to chatbot companions and other risks. The broader market for parental control software, encompassing dozens of apps, was worth an estimated $1.57 billion in 2025 and is expected to nearly triple in value by 2034. Bark Technologies, the current leader among content-monitoring apps, says it scanned 11 billion messages to or from 7.5 million children in the US in 2025. Its free school program is in more than 3,700 districts, covering about one in 10 kids in the US. While Bark aims to flag only content that trips its filters, some competitors, like FlashGet Kids, include features like screen mirroring and camera access. 

These apps have had genuine successes: They’ve prevented suicide attempts, intercepted predators, averted school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves. To get a read on how digital surveillance affects young people, I scraped more than 600,000 reviews of the leading apps and talked to kids, parents, and people who were monitored as children and are now grown. Some kids were grateful for their parents’ protection. Others described false alarms that got them punished, secrets revealed before they were ready, breakdowns of trust, and anxiety they carried into adulthood. (To protect their privacy, we’re not using their full names.)

None of this is easily fixed. But child-safety researchers and advocates say better approaches exist. One is to make the platforms themselves safer, forcing social media companies to build guardrails instead of leaving families to find their own. This “duty of care” approach is now advancing in the UK, Australia, and a number of US states. Another is to spend less effort watching kids and more effort helping them recognize risk, cope with it, and turn to a trusted adult when something goes wrong. This approach is called resilience.

Wisniewski and others are developing tools that don’t aggressively monitor kids but train them in resilience and build trust with parents. “If we define safety as the absence of risk, the way you keep them safe is by keeping them off the platforms entirely,” she says. “But if we define safety as the ability to protect oneself and engage without engaging a risk, the solutions look very different.” It is the difference between abstinence lectures and sex ed.

---

Content-monitoring apps typically involve two pieces of software—one on the child’s device, one on the parent’s. A parent installs the kid-side app, connects the kid’s accounts, and chooses what to surveil: messages, social apps, browsing, location, screen time. The kid-side software forwards activity to the company’s algorithmic classifiers, which scan for content related to sex, drugs, bullying, and self-harm, among other categories, and push alerts to a parent-facing dashboard. The same type of software can be loaded into school-issued accounts and devices. 

Sometimes the safety net works. Titania Jordan, Bark’s chief marketing officer, told me the FBI has thanked the company on multiple occasions for bringing credible school-shooting threats to its attention. “I hate that we have to exist,” she says. “But I’m so thankful that we do.” According to Bark’s annual report, its classifiers alerted hundreds of thousands of families to severe self-harm risks in 2025. Gaggle, a school-monitoring competitor, makes a similar claim in its own annual report, crediting its software with saving over 1,000 lives in the 2024–’25 school year. 

Nearly one in five kids noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said monitoring broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress.

Real-world efficacy across the market is harder to measure, though there are hundreds of anecdotes in the reviews—predominantly about how location-sharing apps like Life360 have helped parents find lost kids. Dozens of reviewers also praise content-monitoring apps for averting major crises like potential suicide or self-harm. Of the reviews I scraped (reviews, it’s worth noting, represent a self-­selected sample that’s skewed toward strong feelings), over 200,000 had some indication of whether they were written by a parent or a kid. Parents liked whatever worked. On average, screen-time limiters and location trackers drew four- or five-star reviews 74% to 78% of the time. OS-level controls and content-scanning apps fared worse (44% and 48% positive reviews, respectively), with parents’ top grievance being that the apps were unreliable: They disconnected, missed genuinely troubling content, and raised alarms over nothing.

The kids being watched had different concerns. Of the reviews I could attribute to either a parent or a kid, about 14,000 came from kids being monitored now or from adults looking back at being monitored in their youth. Roughly one in seven were, on balance, grateful. (Gavin, a teen I messaged with, said that monitoring “taught me self-accountability and integrity.”) But nearly one in five noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said it broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress. That’s not surprising, given that child-development experts have long said testing boundaries and building autonomy are what adolescence is for. A 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, which pooled 31 long-term studies on how parent-child communication changes, found that children naturally disclose less to their parents as they age—the work of building an independent self.

Making matters harder for kids, a lot gets caught in the dragnet unnecessarily. S., an 11-year-old on the autism spectrum, recalls messaging her best friend at school about whether a service dog might help with her meltdowns or keep her from harming herself. The school used Bark, which alerted the principal, S.’s parents, and her friend’s parents, citing content involving “self-harm.” Perhaps frightened by the alert, the friend’s parents cut off contact between the girls. “My first thought was, why?” S. told me. “It’s not like I’m hiding anything. But I’d rather people who weren’t in the situation not see it.” Over a year later, the girls still don’t speak.

While apps aren’t in charge of parents’ reactions, false flags do seem to be more the rule than the exception. “Ninety-nine percent of the alerts are garbage,” says Grant Callaghan, an Australian dad who tried several monitoring apps with his 13-year-old son before deciding to build his own. “It flagged two kids calling a third one annoying as bullying. It flagged a kid complaining of a headache as ‘medically concerning content.’” When I ran Bark on a test phone set up as a 10-year-old’s, it manufactured a grooming scenario out of a random password I saved in the Notes app. 

Bark’s Jordan doesn’t dispute that false alarms happen, volunteering an example of a soccer player whose photo of a net-scraped wrist was marked as potential self-harm. She says that over-flagging is safer than under-flagging, though: “You’d rather know that than not know that.” In a 2021 study with Bark, CDC researchers found that students who tripped multiple risk flags were far likelier to trigger an alert for severe self-harm later—indicating that flags aren’t necessarily noise.

Another problem is that Bark and similar monitoring apps surface things kids may not be ready to share. In a national survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, nearly a third of LGBTQ+ students said they or someone they knew had been outed by school monitoring software. Jordan said Bark does not flag sexual orientation, but discussions about it could be captured when it screens chats for sexual content. Again, what adults do with such alerts, she added, is beyond any app’s control. “If a parent responds to a child’s identity with rejection,” she told me, “that is a parenting failure, not a child safety feature working as intended.”

Damage caused by monitoring tools can follow kids into adulthood. One in eight reviews left by adults looking back on their years of being monitored describes lasting harm. Only one of the people I contacted agreed to go on the record at all, the others citing privacy worries and anxiety that continues to haunt them. 

“There’s so many ways for teens to get around [controls]. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don’t trust you.”

Pam Wisniewski

That woman, M., is now 19. She got her first smartphone at 13 and says her mother installed a monitoring app before handing it over. Though she’d been abused from a young age, the first serious beating, M. tells me, came shortly after she texted a friend about her depression. “She didn’t want me to be able to talk to people about the things that she was doing to me,” M. speculates. She eventually got a secret second phone and ultimately ended contact with her mother. Today, M. won’t let even her fiancé touch her phone. “I have been watched my whole life,” she says. “I deserve this sense of privacy.” 

M.’s case represents the extreme end of a spectrum: an app enabling abusive behavior. But it could reflect a broader issue, particularly with tools downloaded outside official app stores—aka, ones that are sideloaded. A 2025 audit led by researchers at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences and University College London found that nearly half the sideloaded monitoring apps they looked at are functionally indistinguishable from stalkerware. 

Above all else, it’s not clear how well these apps fulfill their core promise of keeping kids safer. No commercial monitoring app has produced a controlled trial that I was able to find showing that it reduces harm. 

Kids swap tips online on how to bypass the surveillance. About 7% of the app reviews left by children describe a concrete workaround. “If you red-team them at all,” Wisniewski says, “there’s so many ways for teens to get around them. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don’t trust you.” In a 2018 survey, her team found that use of parental controls was associated with an increase in the online risk kids encountered, including exposure to harassment. Causality, though, is hard to pin down, because monitoring may follow trouble rather than cause it. 

Risks may also migrate out of view, as potential predators actively seek out unmonitored spaces. According to Bark’s 2025 annual report, alerts about predators and grooming behavior have fallen in recent years as conversations move into blind spots. Thorn, a child-safety nonprofit, has found that offenders routinely direct targets onto encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. After Meta encrypted Messenger by default, the number of reports reaching the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children dropped nearly 20% in a year—a trend the center attributed to lost visibility. Parents can block access to such spaces, but tech-­fluent kids can slip around that through browser versions, borrowed phones, or secret accounts. 

Despite their flaws, content-­monitoring apps thrive because parents feel overwhelmed. There is no federal law in the US requiring platforms to design their products to be safe for users, and any safeguards that do exist have proved insufficient time and time again. In 2024 the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), a suicide prevention nonprofit, analyzed 12 million moderation decisions related to suicide and self-harm that had been logged by six major social platforms. More than 95% came from just two of them: Pinterest and TikTok. Instagram and Facebook each accounted for 1% and X.com for even less—evidence, the researchers argue, not that they host less worrisome content but that they’re less inclined to moderate it. 

Meta’s Instagram Teen Accounts fared little better in MRF audits. Of the safety tools tested in a 2025 review coauthored by Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director who designed many of the company’s antibullying tools in the mid-2010s, only 17% worked as advertised. Josh Golin, who runs the children’s advocacy group Fairplay, offers the simplest explanation for such failures: “Almost any change that’s going to make kids safer is going to mean less money.” Documents unsealed in lawsuits against Meta allege that the company weighed safety fixes against the engagement they would cost—and chose growth. 

Some groups are working to create more accountability. ParentsSOS is a coalition of families who have lost children to online harms. The group has been a driving force behind several state laws. In 2017, David’s Law made cyberbullying a crime in Texas, and Mississippi criminalized sextortion after 16-year-old Walker Montgomery died by suicide within hours of being targeted by a scammer posing as a teenage girl. 

The courts are moving too. Nearly 2,900 federal lawsuits by families and school districts are pending against social media platforms. And in March 2026, New Mexico became the first state to win its own child-safety case against Meta, netting a $375 million verdict. A newer wave of suits targets AI: The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine are suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT coached him toward suicide. And in January, Character.AI settled a wrongful-death suit brought by the mother of a 14-year-old who had formed an intense attachment to one of its chatbots before taking his life. 

ParentsSOS members have also been instrumental in advancing the Kids Online Safety Act in Congress. In its original form, the law would have imposed a duty of care on social media companies, meaning they’d have to design their features to mitigate harms to minors rather than to maximize engagement. They would also have to give kids tools to limit who can contact them. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate in 2024, but its chances of becoming law remain in flux. The House’s new rewrite—blessed by the tech industry—strips the duty-of-care provision. 

But even as they push to fill the regulatory void, parents who have faced tragedy don’t see monitoring tools as an answer. “You don’t pay extra for seat belts in the car, or airbags,” says ParentsSOS cofounder Maurine Molak, whose son David (of David’s Law) died by suicide in 2016 after months of cyberbullying. 

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Other critics of monitoring tools say the real issue is with how they’re built. The systems, says Wisniewski, need to be reworked so they keep kids safe without violating the privacy and autonomy that adolescents require. The goal isn’t no monitoring or social apps, but better ones—and a principled way of preparing young people to handle risk while also promoting trust between them and their parents. 

Wisniewski’s resilience-based approach focuses on developing three pillars: self-regulation to help kids decide what healthy use looks like, risk coping to teach them what to do when something bad happens, and a support system of trusted adults and peers to turn to. She didn’t invent the idea of resilience; the finding that children grow stronger through manageable exposure to adversity has anchored developmental psychology since the 1970s. Sonia Livingstone, who has studied children’s online lives at the London School of Economics for over two decades, has amassed evidence from 33 countries that online risk and opportunity are inseparable, and that children shielded from every risk never get the practice to handle any. 

A growing body of research indicates that inculcating resilience works in practice. In 2024, development economists at Hiroshima and Hitotsubashi Universities published a randomized trial of a digital-safety curriculum that was taught to junior high students in Vietnam. Across four modules, students learned how scammers and groomers operate, how to protect themselves, and how to find help. When tested a month later, only about 15% of those who’d taken the training engaged in risky online activity, compared with 50% to 60% of the control group. Similarly, Wisniewski’s own research suggests that teens high in resilience, exposed to the same risks as everyone else, show less negative impact from that exposure.

The systems need to be reworked so they keep kids safe without violating the privacy and autonomy adolescents require. The goal isn’t no apps, but better ones.

Her contribution is pushing resilience into technology itself. Her research group, the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab, has developed alternatives to the current crop of apps, though it’s never commercialized them. An app called Circle of Trust monitors teens’ messages but shows them the same dashboard a parent sees, and it lets each pair work out a set of trusted contacts whose chats the teen can keep private. When 17 parent-kid pairs tested it in 2020, most rated it as more useful and less corrosive of trust than a stricter app. 

Her focus now is less a product than a method. Through a program called Teenovate, she trains teenagers as research apprentices and co-creators of their own safety tools. Since 2019, more than 85 teens have worked on prototypes and safety features dealing with cyberbullying, sexting, and privacy. They developed the prototype app MOSafely, which reports potential harms to kids directly, so they can review alerts and decide when to involve their parents. The end goal of Teenovate is to fashion evidence-­based design patterns that tech platforms can leverage—though none have adopted them yet. 

To be fair, some existing apps do factor in kids’ privacy and agency. Aura Parents, a Bark competitor, shows parents a weekly well-being score built from sleep, usage, and engagement patterns. The app holds back most of the content but sends parents the self-harm alerts along with guidance on how to navigate a conversation. Jordan told me that Bark continues to consider whether it should show alerts to kids alongside the flags it sends parents, but at this point, she says, the best use of the app involves open dialogue within the family from installation through alert. 

Some parents are even building their own solutions. Frustrated by available offerings, Callaghan, the Australian dad, created a web-based tool called Joey Family. The idea is not to catch his son doing something wrong but to answer a simple question: “Is he happy?” He wanted to know if his kid was lonely, whether he sent more messages than he got back. The data opened conversations. “The people I’m trying to help are people like me who want to have that relationship with their kids,” Callaghan told me. “They want to be guides and learners.”

If anything is fundamental, it’s the relationship: Online safety efforts work best when anchored by a young person’s trust in someone else. For kids whose homes aren’t safe—like M., or Wisniewski when she was young—that someone can even be an online community. “There are so many ways where we can find real community online,” says Caitlyn Vergara, a child-safety researcher at Harvard who studies youth mental health. “Especially for youth of color coming from majority-white spaces, it is a legitimate way to find community when community is not tangible around you.” Walling off kids in the name of safety can isolate them, she says; the point is to make sure every kid has somewhere safe to belong.

The core tension is that families are being asked to solve at the kitchen table a problem engineered in boardrooms. Monitoring is one answer to that assignment, but while it might mitigate risks from outside the home, it can also damage the trust inside it. The best parents can do is refuse to become one more thing their kids have to hide from—and stop believing they should have to fix a dangerous situation alone. 

Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist and writer based in New Hampshire. She’s also the author of Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World. 

Next month, on September 8, MIT Technology Review will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. 

By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they’re focused on in their work, we aim to give readers a sense of what advances to expect in the years to come. As a newsroom, we also use this exercise to help us spot rising talent and get to know some of the best early-career researchers in the fields that we cover. 

The editors of MIT Technology Review published the first Innovators Under 35 list in 1999, and it’s become a beloved annual tradition alongside our lists of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, and (new this year) 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now. 

The people we’ve featured through the years have gone on to shape the tech industry and our broader culture, from Lisa Su (featured in 2002), whose stunning turnaround of AMD has built it into one of the top chipmakers worldwide, to Daniel Ek (featured in 2012), who cofounded Spotify (which we described at the time as “a jukebox in the cloud”). Subscribers can browse all the past honorees in this database. 

Selecting the 2026 Innovators was a monthslong endeavor. This year, we received 550 nominations, both from staff and via our public nomination process. From those entries, our editors selected 110 semifinalists. We looked for candidates who were setting out to solve big problems or answer pressing scientific questions in their work, and who had already made clear progress toward their goals. 

All semifinalists then completed an application to help us learn more about them. They collected reference letters, uploaded videos, and submitted résumés. Forty-four expert judges then helped us evaluate these applications. Some of these judges are former Innovators themselves. Many have returned year after year to volunteer their time, energy, and expertise to the judging process. We’re grateful for their efforts. 

In the end, our editors reviewed all of the judges’ scores and comments and selected the 35 winners. Each works in one of four categories: biotechnology, artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, and climate and energy. 

“These Innovators represent some of the best aspects of science and technology research—pushing forward bold ideas to improve the future for everyone,” says Costa Samaras, a 2026 judge who is also the director of Carnegie Mellon’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. 

The 2026 list of Innovators will be available to MIT Technology Review subscribers on our site on September 8. To access the package when it comes out online, you can subscribe now via this link. It will also be published in the September/October issue, which will be available on newsstands worldwide on August 31. 

Do you know someone who deserves a spot on next year’s list? Nominations for the 2027 competition will open by early December. Check back then or sign up for our daily newsletter The Download to stay in the loop. 

Baek, a 35-year-old manager at the South Korean semiconductor titan SK Hynix, was enrolled in Sunoo, a matchmaking company based in Seoul, a year ago. In a move typical of anxious South Korean parents, his mother signed him up, hoping to find a good wife for her son.

Lately, says Baek (who asked to be referred to by his last name to protect his privacy), he and his coworkers are having better luck finding dates than they used to, perhaps because of the dazzling bonuses they just got. Flush with eye-popping profits from the AI chip boom, SK Hynix struck a landmark deal last year with its labor union to pay out 10% of operating profits to employees, which translates to an extra $476,000 per employee this year. A similar agreement and sizable lump sum followed for Samsung workers this May.

With their newfound wealth, chip workers like Baek have become the most sought-after bachelors and bachelorettes in South Korea. “I have a coworker who’s perpetually going on blind dates, and he’s been getting so many recently,” says Baek. “For the past few months, I’ve been getting many blind dates too, perhaps because of the bonuses I got.”

Young South Koreans joke online that the best outfit to wear on a blind date is an SK Hynix uniform. 

The AI chip boom is changing the social fabric of South Korea by minting a new elite of “silicon-collar” workers earning about 20 times as much as the average South Korean. Although it’s helping some chip workers to find relationships, it’s also fueling fears of a deepening wealth disparity—and a loud public debate about inequality.

Love in the time of chips

South Korea is the epicenter of the chip boom fueling the AI race. Samsung and SK Hynix supply the vast majority of the world’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, which power Nvidia’s AI accelerators—the GPUs used to train AI models. As AI companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building data centers around the world, demand for HBMs is rising beyond what suppliers can keep up with, driving their prices to unprecedented levels. Samsung and SK Hynix are raking in record profits as a result. 

South Korea’s economy now orbits the two chip giants. In May, both companies topped $1 trillion in market value. And chip exports helped fuel a 1.7% surge in South Korea’s gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2026. South Korea’s main equity index, Kospi, has nearly tripled over the past year, becoming the best-performing market in the world.

Swimming in cash, chip workers are going on shopping sprees in department stores near the “semicon belt” fabs—splurging on everything from lavish furniture and electronic appliances to jewelry and watches. They’re also snapping up homes near the commuter-shuttle routes that ferry workers to campus. And they’re shelling out for matchmakers.

“Quite a lot of people ask me if I can introduce them to chip workers,” says Lee Sung-mi, a matchmaker at Sunoo, who has been playing Cupid for chip workers for years. “In fact, people who once rejected them are asking to be matched with them again, now that their salaries and bonuses have shot so far above what everyone else earns.”

One woman who lives in Gangnam, a ritzy district in Seoul lined with luxury high-rises and designer boutiques, previously turned down a chip worker at SK Hynix because his fab was too far out in Icheon, a rural city about 50 miles southeast of Seoul that’s dotted with rice farms and manufacturing plants. But in May, she asked her matchmaker to set them up again. They’ve now been dating for a month.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

In South Korea, matchmaking companies evaluate their clients on a long list of criteria such as education, job, income, looks, and family background, including whether their aging parents have saved enough for retirement. In an economy where housing prices and child care costs are soaring, competition for jobs is fierce, and the social safety net is thin, a good job is the ultimate dating credential—all the more coveted at a time when many young South Koreans are forgoing marriage and children altogether, seeing family life as an unaffordable dream.

Every client at Sunoo gets a spouse rating, determined by an algorithm that assigns scores for each criterion. Since their hefty bonuses were announced, the job ratings of Samsung employees have risen from 80 to 84, while those of SK Hynix employees climbed from 78 to 82. Scores above 90 are reserved for doctors and lawyers. Long prized as paragons of prestige and wealth, they’re now close to being overtaken by chip workers. A score of 99, the highest possible rating, is earmarked for heads of state.  

Their new status is reshaping how chip workers themselves approach dating. “Chip workers from Samsung and SK Hynix are enrolling in our services because they feel more financially ready,” says Lee. “They’re also becoming pickier, as they feel like they’re now in a good position. The women want to meet men with higher incomes and better jobs, and the men want to meet younger and better-looking women with better jobs.” 

An SK Hynix engineer in her 40s, who was once desperate to get married as soon as possible, started turning down men she would’ve dated before the chip boom. Lately, showered with more matches, she’s been sifting through her suitors more carefully. “She now has peace of mind and wants to take her time to meet someone better,” says Lee.

A mixed blessing

While chip workers enjoy the fruits of their labor, the bonus bonanza is stoking anxieties among other South Koreans. “When wealth disparity is no longer a mere difference of income but, rather, a difference in identity … it can fuel social conflict,” says Se-eun Jung, an economist at Inha University. 

Earlier this month, the Bank of Korea warned that the chip boom will create a “K-shaped” economy, where a handful of workers race ahead while everyone else falls behind. The windfall, the bank said, is flowing to high income earners and then barely trickling out to the broader economy. Such polarization could erode people’s motivation to work by narrowing the path to upward mobility, it cautioned. 

Workers in other industries are venting online about feeling demoralized by the ballooning wealth gap. “The one-billion-won ($650,000) bonuses have crushed my motivation to work. I have no energy when I teach,” an employee of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education wrote on Blind, an app where employees can discuss their workplaces anonymously. Others are giving up the job hunt, lamenting that years of working at a small company could never match a year’s bonus at Samsung. 

In a Facebook post in May, presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom proposed paying an “AI dividend” to citizens by taxing AI profits. The idea sparked a heated public debate over whether the government should redistribute gains from the chip boom. Some argue that the industry is indebted to the society that has educated its engineers, subsidized its infrastructure, and provided tax credits. Others counter that the profits are already being shared with the public as stocks.

Then there’s the question of how long this new social class will last. The semiconductor industry is notoriously cyclical; AI spending may cool, or rival chipmakers could catch up. There’s also the risk that chip workers will be replaced by automation. Samsung announced in March that it plans to fully automate its fabs by 2030, drawing backlash from chip workers. 

Although they’re unsure how long the boom will last, chip workers like Baek are riding high, for now. “These days, we say we want to work hard and bury our bones here at SK Hynix,” he says. “And I hope I can find [a wife] similar to me.”