An exclusive early look at Apple’s new touchscreen MacBook Pro—the computer Apple said would never happen.

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

Jess Asato’s public campaigning for victims of online abuse put her in the crosshairs of Grok’s deepfake scandal. Then the UK member of parliament became a victim of the abuse herself.

“Sovereign citizens” think they can live beyond the reach of the state. Now the movement has influencers—and they’re selling all sorts of anarchist courses to expectant families.

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?

To escape the chaos of her Russian childhood, Lili Infante became an American law enforcement prodigy. She pioneered the DEA’s investigations of the dark web—never suspecting who she’d find hiding there.

Mary Anne Franks has spent years fighting against online abuse. When people are abused with impunity, she says, the message becomes “We do not care about women’s voices.”

The codirector of “You Can See Everything” talks exclusively to WIRED about truth, lies, and Theranos.

Elizabeth Holmes’ husband is a major figure in Nathan Fielder’s new documentary. But who is Billy Evans—and is he really working on a second blood-testing company?

WIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.

When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. 

As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they were built by the defense tech company Anduril and equipped with cameras and AI to automatically detect and track people. They transmit live video to nearby control rooms and can send alerts to the government-issued smartphones held by agents in the area, prompting the closest available to respond.

These AI-enabled towers are meant to give greater visibility across the 1,951-mile southern border, freeing up border agents from having to spend hours staring into video monitors. They were installed in this particular place to spot border crossers before they reached the nearby town of Sunland Park.

If the system worked as intended, Morales should have been apprehended. If he needed medical help, agents were trained to provide it.

That didn’t happen. Despite the nearby surveillance towers, it was employees of the local landfill, rather than Border Patrol, who first spotted Morales that morning. At 1 p.m. the workers saw him again, now lying in the sand. At 4 p.m. the landfill workers saw that he had not moved and called Border Patrol. Agents arrived 45 minutes later. He was dead. When an agent then called 911 to report the body, he said it was “probably one of the migrants crossing through there,” seemingly unaware that Morales had been moving near the agency’s surveillance systems earlier that day. 

Morales had died just 360 feet from the closest surveillance tower. Two more towers stood watch to the east and the west. An autopsy later concluded that he had died of “environmental exposure.” 

The towers surrounding Morales were only the latest addition to the “virtual wall” the government has spent 25 years and billions of dollars building along the entire border, which also includes earlier generations of towers with more basic features, as well as blimps, drones, seismic sensors, and even tunnel-sensing robots. Together, all this technology provides “persistent surveillance” and “situational awareness” to help the Border Patrol quickly and accurately detect people crossing and, crucially, make sure agents are sent to intercept them. CBP has also credited it with saving lives.

But a first-of-its-kind investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that deaths like Morales’s are startlingly common. We cross-referenced nearly 4,000 locations where human remains were found—drawn from records collected by nonprofit groups like No More Deaths and Humane Borders, as well as hundreds of records we obtained in Texas—with information on nearly 600 towers identified by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We considered when towers were installed and when each person is estimated to have died, and combined this information with field reporting from the border. The result is the first comprehensive map and analysis of deaths near CBP surveillance towers. 

Our investigation shows that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras.

We found more than 1,050 people who died within range of border surveillance towers between 2015 and early 2026. These deaths are not failures of a few towers or technologies: We found deaths within the advertised range of nearly two-thirds of all the towers we analyzed. Our topographical analysis—which assessed the degree to which terrain might block a tower’s view of a particular death and its surveillance area in general—found that some have sight of as little as 10% of their advertised surveillance area, and yet we also found most deaths did not occur in towers’ blind spots. These deaths are not the result of legacy systems, as our estimate found more than 110 people have died within range of modern autonomous towers from Anduril, among the most advanced systems CBP has deployed, since 2021.

The overall picture reveals repeated failures of one of the virtual wall’s basic security functions, as CBP has described it in press releases: to effectively identify and locate migrants entering illegally into the United States. 

The year that Morales died, 18 other people died in that same stretch of desert in range of the three Anduril towers. Five were visible from the same surveillance tower closest to where his body was discovered.

One man, after walking a mile past the border and in range of two AI towers, dragged his 30-year-old brother into the shade when he began having trouble breathing, according to records we obtained from the medical examiner. The two were spotted by Border Patrol only when the man waved down a helicopter for help; by the time agents arrived, his brother was already dead. A 24-year-old woman died near another Anduril tower, where our terrain analysis showed it should have had clear sight of her location. Her body lay unnoticed for weeks; it was decomposed, and blistered by the summer heat, when it was spotted by agents patrolling the area. 

A few miles west, and a short drive from a Border Patrol station, four other AI towers stood watch. Near them, 10 more bodies were found that year, all in locations where at least one tower had a clear view.

In response to a list of questions, an Anduril spokesperson replied that once a tower is delivered, it is operated by CBP, and directed questions about specific incidents to the agency. The response noted that an incident occurring nearby does not mean the tower missed a detection and said actual surveillance ranges vary depending on terrain, physical obstructions, and the boundaries CBP sets for where the tower should look (CBP is able to set virtual boundaries on towers’ views for privacy and other reasons). The Anduril spokesperson also alleged inaccuracies in our reporting, given those boundaries and obstructions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on what was inaccurate.

The most pressing question in any death near the virtual wall is whether authorities knew someone was there and failed to reach them or weren’t aware anyone was crossing at all. Either is a system failure. And the deaths we found capture only the failures that left a trace—we don’t know how many people pass through undetected, or how many bodies remain undiscovered.

Interviews with more than 45 people—including current and former White House advisors and presidential appointees, Border Patrol agents, medical examiners, sheriffs, humanitarian volunteers, and employees of tech companies—showed that both types of failures are occurring: The technology is failing to detect, and agents are failing to respond. Both show the limits of throwing technology at a complex problem. 

The findings reveal previously unreported issues with the virtual wall, even as it continues to enjoy broad political support and a surge in federal spending. Border security hardliners have long seen it as another tool for stopping smugglers moving drugs or people, while others tout it as a cheaper alternative to a physical wall. In 2023, the government estimated that its plans for using the towers, which now number 803, would cost $6.2 billion over their lifespan. With the historic levels of funding it was awarded in 2025, CBP plans to spend $1 billion for 1,497 more towers by 2034.

But our reporting shows that CBP has done little to assess how its towers are working or how many people have died where they keep watch.

Officials who oversaw border security across the last four presidential administrations told us they believed deaths near the so-called virtual wall were either exceedingly rare or nonexistent. But our reporting shows that is not the case. None could point to any comparable analysis the government had ever conducted on its own. Former agents and officials also told us that when someone’s body is found, CBP does not formally investigate whether surveillance should have detected them or, if they were detected, why agents didn’t reach them before they died. 

In response to nearly 30 questions about our findings, which covered multiple generations of technology, Hilton Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, said, “Autonomous surveillance towers use artificial intelligence to detect and classify people, vehicles, and animals and alert Border Patrol agents to activity in monitored areas … ASTs complement physical barriers and other border security infrastructure by improving detection and situational awareness between ports of entry. CBP evaluates the technology based on its impact on detection, response coordination, agent safety, and mission outcomes.”

“I’m sure that the cameras and other surveillance assets do deliver … useful intelligence and enhance operational efficacy in some places, under some conditions, in certain circumstances,” says Geoff Boyce, an assistant professor of geography at University College Dublin who has studied surveillance technology used at the US southern border. “I’m also absolutely positive—because this has been the track record—it is not delivering the level of operational support, information, or efficacy that either the companies delivering these infrastructures or the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security claim.” 

We also reached out to multiple lawmakers from both parties with a summary of our findings. In response, Delia Ramirez, a Democrat representing Illinois’s 3rd district who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “AI-powered surveillance technologies are not making us safer. Yet DHS continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective, negligent technologies, with no commitment to oversight or transparency … It is clear we must terminate CBP’s integrated surveillance tower program and dismantle DHS.”

Building the virtual wall

Since its earliest efforts to police the border with Mexico, the US government has faced the same basic challenge: How do you effectively secure nearly 2,000 miles of remote and rugged terrain? It has increasingly turned to technology for answers.

Gerardo Galvan joined Border Patrol in 1995, as the government was undertaking an unprecedented expansion of border enforcement. In 1993, President Clinton’s first year in office, the agency mobilized huge numbers of agents to guard the country’s urban borders, starting in El Paso, Texas. That pushed more crossings to rural, unpopulated areas—which quickly proved to be far more deadly because of the rugged desert terrain, extreme temperatures, scarcity of water and the long, indirect routes often used by smugglers.

Stopping these remote crossings was a new law enforcement challenge for the agency, especially given the limited technology available at the time. “We had radios,” says Galvan, who would go on to be the head of operations for the El Paso sector—not the cell phones or GPS systems agents have today. They relied on underground sensors left over from the Vietnam War to alert them to movement.

The biggest technology rollout of Galvan’s early career started around 1998. That was when Border Patrol began installing its first video cameras that agents could remotely pan and zoom. They were mounted on metal structures similar to cell-phone towers, 60 to 80 feet tall, or on buildings in urban areas. 

“For the first time, somebody sitting in a room somewhere was able to surveil large swaths of area without being dependent on getting an agent out there with binoculars,” says Matthew Hudak, a former deputy chief of Border Patrol who was working as a frontline agent at the time. “That was a very significant game changer, and for the most part, it was a huge, huge advance.”

This early iteration of the virtual wall was a big deal: In its first eight years, 200 towers were installed along the southern border at a cost of more than $429 million. But the system’s flaws were obvious to anyone who used it.

“There could be … 30 screens on a wall,” says Mark Borkowski, who managed CBP contracting, including the surveillance tower program. Each camera might be capable of seeing three or five miles in any direction. The agent was expected to keep eyes on all that space—upwards of 850 square miles.

“Well, what are the chances after 20 minutes that those Border Patrol agents would see an explosion on one of those screens?” Borkowski says. “About zero.” 

When these cameras were first being put up, the plan was to pair them eventually with a system that would automatically direct them toward places where sensors picked up activity, so agents would know where to look. But by 2005, the DHS inspector general said that still hadn’t materialized, and that illegal activity might “go unnoticed” unless agents were actively watching the cameras. Nonetheless, more towers were installed, forming what is today known as the Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS). In 2013, the defense giant General Dynamics won a contract worth up to $103 million to overhaul and expand RVSS along the border, becoming the primary contractor behind the system that remains in use today. (That contract eventually grew to a ceiling of $216 million, and the company received another award in 2023 worth up to $135 million.)

General Dynamics would install more cameras, better sensors, and additional towers. But the problem identified nearly 15 years before remained unsolved. It was information overload: One agent told MIT Technology Review about an incident in San Diego in which cameras captured a group of 30 crossing the border and getting picked up in a van, all unnoticed by the agent monitoring those cameras. Agents said the virtual wall was bringing more of the border into view than they could reasonably pay attention or respond to. 

The camera room was also the job nobody wanted. New Border Patrol agents, often in their early 20s, want to be outside in trucks and ATVs, not sitting in a dark room watching screens—even though the expanding virtual wall increasingly required someone to do exactly that. “Someone that’s injured and can’t go out into the field—we’ll send them to the camera room,” says Rafael Reyes, who was in charge of the Border Patrol station in Deming, New Mexico, until 2024. 

Reyes says it was also a job his agents were often too busy to do properly. His station area had about 30 cameras, and the agents responsible for them also had to monitor sensor alerts and radio traffic, run records checks, and coordinate with other agents. “Then if they have some time, they’ll monitor the cameras,” he says. 

Not only that, but many cameras didn’t work. At Reyes’s station in New Mexico, five of the 30 cameras were broken on any given day, he says. Others had limited functionality; they might be capable of looking in just one direction or seeing only in the daytime. Jaime Fierro, a former agent who worked in the Laredo sector in Texas until 2025, said the broken towers were tanking morale among agents and that they brought it up at every staff meeting. “That was like basically having an eye shut for us on the border,” he says. 

They weren’t alone: In 2024, members of the House Committee on Homeland Security wrote that more than 66% of Border Patrol’s first-generation towers were unusable, despite operating budgets of $50 million to $100 million each year. In January 2026, 30% remained broken, one congressional staffer told MIT Technology Review. The RVSS program was estimated in 2020 to have a total cost of $3.7 billion.

Border Patrol has nonetheless publicly credited these cameras with helping to save lives. The agency has published dozens of press releases, dating as far back as 2016, about instances when agents responded to people seen in distress on the remote video cameras. Despite these publicized wins, the bodies began to pile up, undetected, beneath these systems’ watchful gaze.

Near El Cenizo, Texas, there’s a roughly 13-square-mile expanse of mesquite bushes and grasses described by the Webb County Sheriff’s Office as containing sections of Hachar Ranch and Espejo Ranch. It’s surrounded by seven RVSS systems. It was nonetheless a hot spot for fatalities: MIT Technology Review found that 19 people died there, including one man who died less than 500 feet from the road bordering the ranches and half a mile from two schools. In each of these cases, narratives that we obtained via public records requests describe officers’ learning of these people only after their bodies were discovered or through 911 calls reporting them missing, not as a result of the border surveillance technology installed across Hachar Ranch. 

In response to a list of questions about its towers and these specific incidents, General Dynamics referred us to CBP. CBP did not address any of our questions about RVSS towers.  

 

Stories of some of the people that died near RVSS towers

Many deaths near RVSS towers happened in Texas, in the heavily surveilled corridors between the Rio Grande and the nearby highways, where paid smugglers often organize pickups after crossings. Cameras watch many of the spots where people are known to cross, often looking across the river into Mexico to spot them before they reach the water. Drownings are common; we found multiple cases in which local fishermen hooked the bodies of people who had died attempting the crossing.

In one instance, a family of three from Brazil attempted to cross the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas, in 2022. The father, Daniel Lenda, was carrying his two-year-old daughter, Eloah, on his shoulder when he fell in the water. The mother, 23-year-old Thais Natali Montenegro Lenda, lifted Eloah out of the water as she watched her husband disappear. 

She placed the girl, now unresponsive, on a rock and went for help. She was just 100 feet from one camera system and a third of a mile from two others, set up precisely to enable faster apprehensions at a popular crossing point. Our topographical analysis shows that all three cameras had a clear view of the place where the family crossed and exited the water. Nonetheless, Thais Natali was not spotted until she waved down an agent on the Del Rio-Acuña bridge. The agent provided CPR to the toddler, who did not survive. Daniel’s body was found days later. 

Val Verde County sheriff Joe Frank Martínez responded to that case (though Border Patrol might discover bodies, local law enforcement is responsible for investigating the deaths). He grew up in the area with his nine siblings and has been sheriff since 2009. Riding with MIT Technology Review through Del Rio in his patrol vehicle, he rattled off the deaths that his office has responded to since he became sheriff. 

He keeps a three-inch-thick binder of these cases in his office. But this case with the toddler still sticks out in his memory. He told MIT Technology Review that when he arrived on scene, he heard from Border Patrol that the tower operator monitoring the camera had seen the father and daughter fall in the river. He never received an answer as to why agents weren’t sent sooner. Martínez asked for the footage from the surveillance cameras to aid in his investigation of what happened. Border Patrol never provided it. (General Dynamics did not respond to our questions about this incident, instead directing us to CBP. The agency did not address questions about this incident either.)

Establishing how many people have died in range of the virtual wall is challenging, but it’s especially so in the case of the RVSS towers. There are different models, some with a shorter range of sight—one to three miles—and others with a longer range of up to 7.5 miles. Former agents and officials told us most towers should see at least five miles, but since no public records exist to confirm the model type of any given tower, we used several possible viewing distances to calculate the number of deaths considered in range.

Another complication is that many remains are never found at all. For those that are, MIT Technology Review could analyze only deaths that had been logged with GPS coordinates or sufficiently precise location descriptions. Many records lack this level of detail, including nearly a fifth of the more than 1,500 cases we obtained from 14 Texas counties. We also needed to determine when someone died, rather than simply when their remains were found, to confirm that a tower was present at the time of death. When official sources did not provide an estimate, we consulted multiple medical examiners on how to make that determination from the available details. And satellite imagery provides only intermittent evidence to suggest when towers arose, not exact proof of when they were functioning. For these reasons, as detailed in our methodology, we tried to be conservative in our analysis.

Even so, the number of deaths estimated to have occurred near at least one of these towers is staggering: somewhere between 500 and 700 since 2015. Even if we look only at towers in rural areas, where their views are far less likely to be blocked by buildings, we still estimate more than 300 people have died in places where the cameras had a line of sight, most less than three miles from a tower. Of the nearly 300 RVSS towers we included in our analysis, more than 250 were within range of a location where someone died. More than 150 people died within a half-mile of one, often across open, empty plains, close enough to see the cameras themselves perched atop towers up to 200 feet tall.

The next watchers

When Borkowski was overseeing the rollout of those first-generation towers at CBP, he became increasingly certain that simply having more remote video cameras was not going to lead to faster responses. The information overload meant the government could watch a large area of the border but not meaningfully see, much less act on, everything within it. The agency’s focus then became solving that overload problem. 

What if, instead of relying on someone to scan 30 screens, the towers could use radar to detect motion, and then point the camera to it automatically? 

In 2011, Border Patrol asked the industry for a new generation of technology that could do just that—initially focusing on Arizona, where the border was busiest. The contract ultimately went to the Israeli defense contractor Elbit, whose tower systems watch Israel’s borders. In 2015, the company started installing versions of these—called integrated fixed towers, or IFTs—that could each see more than five miles.

The IFTs were still being installed when President Trump first took office, in 2017. They didn’t command the same attention as Trump’s campaign promise of a physical wall, but there was still support. Trump’s deputy CBP commissioner, Ronald Vitiello, told Congress in 2018 that the IFT towers automatically detect people with radar and then track them, adding that such surveillance technology is “critical in protecting border areas with short vanishing times, where illicit crossers can quickly evade law enforcement by ‘vanishing’ into border communities.”

There were 55 IFTs built in Arizona under an initial $145 million contract with Elbit and other contracts that followed. The towers collectively watch more than 7,000 square miles of terrain, from the mountainous areas outside Nogales to the plains of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation. Arizona is in many ways well suited for these tall towers because much of its landscape is flatter than, say, Southern California. 

But even here, being within a tower’s advertised range does not necessarily mean being within view. There could be terrain, brush, or buildings that block the line of sight. 

MIT Technology Review conducted a topographical analysis to estimate whether each tower had a clear or obstructed view of the place where someone’s remains were found. We estimated the height of each tower and used US elevation maps to model the terrain between it and the remains. The analysis does not account for buildings or vegetation, though all the towers we analyzed use some form of thermal imaging that is designed to see through light brush.

Most of the instances in which someone died in range of a tower happened where we estimate that the camera’s views were not blocked by terrain—a finding that held in both rural and urban areas. And even when someone died in a blind spot, it does not mean they did not pass through a tower’s line of sight. Additionally, these numerous blind spots indicate issues with the tower’s supposedly comprehensive coverage.

We found that nearly 350 people have died in range of Elbit’s towers since 2015. There were 40 people who died within range of four or more IFTs, with some near as many as six different towers. In May 2024, a 19-year-old man died where three IFTs had a clear view, and a year later, in May 2025, a 38-year-old woman died where two IFTs had a similarly clear view. Elbit did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its towers or deaths we found to have occurred near them. 

There’s been a death within range of 52 out of the 53 IFTs we analyzed, but some were particularly notable. There’s a tower located a couple of hours from Tucson on the Tohono O’odham reservation that we estimate has upwards of 80% visibility of the surrounding area. Still, 27 people, ages 19 to 64, have died in its surveillance area just since 2021, along with several others whose remains have not been identified. In 25 of these cases, we estimated that the tower had a clear line of sight to the location where the person died.

Stories of some of the people who died near IFTs

---

The age of autonomy

Around 2018, officials within Border Patrol were again discussing the limits of the towers. The new radar systems were better, but they could only detect movement, not what was moving. This generated false alerts from cattle, tumbleweeds, and other harmless activity. The now decades-old dream of the virtual wall remained unfulfilled. Under pressure from Congress, which was demanding to know what $33 billion in proposed funding for border security over the next decade was going to achieve, Border Patrol once again was hoping a new generation of technology could solve its problems.

That year the head of CBP, Kevin McAleenan, created a unit called the Innovation Team. “He gave them some seed money to go after kind of Silicon Valley innovative technologies and run pilots,” Borkowski says. 

One company they landed on was Anduril, the defense tech startup founded by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey. The company was without a product but had funding from Peter Thiel, recruits from the security tech giant Palantir, and a goal of bringing Silicon Valley experimentation to defense and national security technology. 

With grants from the Small Business Innovation Research program, Anduril’s product started taking shape: a 33-foot-tall solar-powered structure with cameras to see and radar to detect movement, all sitting atop a modular metal pole, with solar panels arrayed beneath. 

More important was the component you could not see: computer vision that promised to automatically classify, track, and generate alerts for what came within the system’s view. Anduril’s standard tower couldn’t see as far as the Elbit and General Dynamics models—about 1.75 miles instead of more than five—but, the company argued, it didn’t need to: By automatically identifying and tracking people, the towers could give agents enough warning to respond. (Its newer, extended-range towers, on the other hand, stand 80 feet tall and are advertised as able to detect and track “objects of interest” up to 7.5 miles away.) 

When President Trump left office in 2021, Anduril continued to find support from his successor. Joe Biden had campaigned on the promise of shutting down the project to expand the physical wall, but he saw political reasons to keep investment in tower technology on the table. “It’s less visible—it’s unobtrusive,” a former immigration advisor to Biden recalls, adding that despite some privacy concerns, the towers were mostly uncontroversial. 

When Border Patrol deployed Anduril towers to the Santa Teresa station in New Mexico in 2021, a press release stated, “Because of its accuracy with detection, in many cases this type of technology can and will save migrant lives.” In a permitting request filed in 2024 for towers in California, the government was even more explicit: “If anyone within the viewshed of the towers appears to be in distress, EMTs or first responders will be sent to help.” 

Anduril echoed those claims. The software built into the surveillance towers, the company wrote in a 2021 press release, gets agents “out of communications operations centers and into the field where they can effectuate security and humanitarian responses.”

It wasn’t the first time CBP had discussed a humanitarian side to its duties; in 1998 the agency created BORSTAR, a search and rescue unit, and by August 2023, it had installed some 170 rescue beacons across the border that people attempting a crossing could theoretically use to call for help. But they weren’t effective, says Mario Agundez, a retired Border Patrol supervisor from Arizona who had worked on various rescue efforts; people either avoid them or “die next to them, because there was no way [for Border Patrol] to get to them in time.” (They don’t always work, either; one that MIT Technology Review passed, just next to a dirt road in the Otay Mountain wilderness area in Southern California, had its prominent solar-powered blue light, meant to be visible for miles to people in distress, turned off on a recent night in August. A CBP spokesperson did not comment on why it was off but said, “The solar-powered beacons are maintained and monitored by the responsible Border Patrol station that patrols that area.”)  

Anduril soared through a pilot phase in just two years before its Sentry towers—then the only autonomous surveillance towers CBP was using—moved into an official program of record with the government in 2020. That’s light speed in the world of government procurement, especially since it was Anduril’s first hardware product. By June 2021, CBP had already spent over $98 million (Anduril’s contract for these towers is now worth up to $1.1 billion). 

---

Gerardo Galvan was in charge of the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station—which patrols the area in New Mexico where Morales’s body was later found—when it received its first batch of Anduril surveillance towers in 2021. His agents were worn out; the El Paso sector, home to his station, had seen encounters tick up each month since April 2020. Galvan says the agents were surprised but eager to get the AI towers, and he began planning where to place them. The sites he was considering sat where one kind of landscape abruptly gives way to another. 

To the east of the station is Cristo Rey, a mountain that obscures the view of the city of El Paso. Running north from Cristo Rey is the state’s border with Texas, where the banks of the Rio Grande are flanked on either side by pecan orchards. And west of those orchards are the towns of Sunland Park and Santa Teresa. The last houses in these neighborhoods butt right up against the desert, which sprawls westward without a single gas station for nearly 100 miles.

It is in this stretch—between the US-Mexico border to the south and Highway 9 to the north—where agents from his station aimed to stop migrants. And when Galvan was planning the tower locations, there were lots of crossings; Santa Teresa was becoming the busiest station in the 125,500-square-mile El Paso sector, as heightened border enforcement in Texas drove people west. Along this new route, more people were dying than in previous years. (The traces of that period are still visible years later; MIT Technology Review visited the area with the humanitarian group Battalion Search and Rescue and saw jawbones bleached white by the sun, alongside frayed backpacks and clothes.)

Galvan’s aim was to use the new towers as a stopgap where there was little other border infrastructure. That included a spot near the foot of Mount Cristo Rey, where there was a break in the border fence and people often attempted to cross. Galvan looked at data on previous apprehensions with an eye toward helping agents spot people before they arrived in more residential neighborhoods. Border Patrol struck agreements with private landowners, who generally didn’t mind having Anduril’s low-profile towers on their land (and were compensated via lease agreements). 

When the towers were first set up near the Santa Teresa station in 2021, engineers from Anduril came to fine-tune the algorithms meant to autonomously classify whether what it had detected was a vehicle or a possible border crosser, among other things. A former engineer for Anduril, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his previous employer, says these algorithms were the main focus of the tower program; Anduril didn’t manufacture the cameras or radar systems itself, so the algorithms were its main value proposition to Border Patrol. 

Galvan says the towers would flag people crossing before agents saw them. But he also saw problems from the start. Agents would apprehend a large group near one of the towers, for example, and check to see if the footage revealed anyone who got away, only to find that the incident hadn’t been captured at all. Anduril’s towers constantly pan around, lingering only on an object of interest. But in these cases, Galvan says, they panned elsewhere, failing to capture the border crossers they were supposed to automatically track.  

Reyes says algorithm mistakes were infrequent but problematic at his station. A group of people was sometimes labeled as cattle, for example, and agents wouldn’t receive an alert. The problem got worse the farther groups were from the camera.

Anduril has touted its technology’s ability to reduce false positives, like cases in which wildlife is mistaken for people. But the company has said little about these false negatives: people the systems fail to detect.

Jaime Fierro, the former agent in the Laredo sector in Texas, describes one incident that shocked him: Agents pursued a car believed to be carrying migrants who had just crossed the border. The car turned around, drove toward the banks of the Rio Grande less than 100 feet from an Anduril tower, and crashed right into the river. Several occupants got out and swam to Mexico while the car floated in the water. Back at the station, Fierro hurried to see what the camera had picked up. Only it never detected the incident at all. There was no footage. “That was a huge, huge issue,” Fierro says. He remembers Anduril coming out to investigate and the problem being sent all the way up to Washington leadership. But Fierro never got an explanation of why the crash was missed. (An Anduril spokesperson did not respond to a question about this incident but said the range of the towers we asked about was limited by physical obstructions and by boundaries established by CBP. )

Several agents estimate that the towers initially missed 10% to 15% of what they should in theory have caught. “To us, 10-15% on a system we spent millions on that was supposed to work—that was alarming,” Fierro says.

Philip Sullivan worked as an agent in the Laredo sector too. When the Anduril program started, he says, he put his hand up to be involved and even went to an Anduril test site for training. When new towers went up, he worked directly with the company on improving its algorithms. He enjoyed the work. But he describes one recurring issue they couldn’t resolve.

Smugglers would put up to a dozen people on a rubber raft, cover them with a tarp, and cross the Rio Grande while using submersible motors to propel it forward. The tarp fooled the algorithm, which detected the motion but attributed it only to an “unidentified object.” That meant no audible alert—the very feature agents relied on, because the Anduril system was supposed to do the watching for them. 

The smugglers repeated the tactic dozens of times. Other smugglers would cover groups with netting or blankets so they would remain undetected while walking through the brush. Only afterwards, having seen the group farther inland and noticed clues about where the people had crossed, would Sullivan review the footage and see the crossings that were missed. He worked with Anduril, sending engineers videos of the crossings to retrain the firm’s algorithms. But the situation had not improved by the time he got promoted to a sector-level job sometime in 2022, he says.

“The whole purpose of their system,” Sullivan says, was the idea that “the cameras are moving around, identifying automatically and tracking and recording and flagging.” Having cameras that could pan on their own worked wonders, he says. But the algorithm had its limits. “You look at it on the screen yourself, and you see the blob and the raft moving across—well, you know that’s people. But to get an AI to identify that is a challenge.”

When the towers were first being rolled out at the Santa Teresa station in 2021 and 2022, Galvan says, similar issues led to a negative feedback loop: An agent would see a tower miss something significant and come to distrust the algorithm. When that agent’s turn came to operate the towers and manage the alerts, they might override the AI altogether and use the camera manually. That would lead to more missed alerts, more distrust.

Despite these shortcomings, the El Paso sector’s relatively flat landscape meant that the system’s cameras had about 80% to 90% visibility, according to our topographical analysis. That was better than in hillier or more mountainous areas, like the Otay Mountain Wilderness to the east of San Diego, where we estimate Anduril’s towers could see just 15% to 25% of their promised coverage area. 

It was in this wilderness, in fact, that some of the first bodies started appearing near Anduril’s towers. During one week in August 2021, two women in their 20s, from the same city in Mexico, died miles apart. Their bodies were found near three different towers that were first observed on satellite imagery between March and July that year. 

One of them, 26-year-old Sarahi Hernández Alfonso, began her journey to cross into the US on August 5, and medical investigators note that she reportedly fainted the next day near the Otay Mountain Wilderness and was left behind. It would be another four days before the Mexican government reported her missing to Border Patrol on August 10, supplying a set of coordinates. Agents went to those coordinates and found her decomposing body. She’d died 1.3 miles from two different Anduril towers, one of which our analysis found had a clear line of sight.

Just the day before, 25-year-old Karina López Antonio was found dead near a third Anduril tower. She had crossed the previous night with her cousin and nephew. That morning, she felt sick, and her nephew looked for a Border Patrol agent to help. When agents returned, she was dead. 

The following October in New Mexico, where the new Anduril towers had been rolled out, agents were patrolling on ATVs when they came across footprints. They followed them until they found the body of 31-year-old César Perea Itzincab. The presence of maggots and the level of decomposition indicated that he had died at least a week earlier, and medical examiners on the scene believe he had dragged himself to the spot where his remains were found. He was 1.5 miles away from an autonomous tower—within Anduril’s advertised range—and should have been visible to the camera, according to our topographical analysis.

We can’t know what those cameras saw as these people died. Footage and data from Anduril’s towers are overwritten every 30 days, and a former official with internal affairs at CBP told us the information wouldn’t be saved for longer unless it was part of an active investigation—which starts only if someone dies in custody. CBP did not respond to questions about specific incidents like this one, and the Sunland Park Police Department closes cases like this when it determines that no crime has been committed. 

The lack of documentation is a missed opportunity, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation, which aims to help rescue migrants in distress—or find and identify their remains. “The surveillance towers along the border could be incredibly useful,” she told us. For example, they could in principle be used to hold Border Patrol agents accountable for whatever actions they did or did not take to locate someone in distress. “What the tool turns out [to do] depends on the person who is holding it,” she says, adding, “I don’t trust the folks that are using them.”

“If I could get that footage,” she says, “then we would go through that, and hopefully bring some answers” to family members and “documented proof of what happened” in their loved ones’ final moments. 

When asked about deaths near Anduril towers, agents often point to faults in the technology. Galvan, for example, says the towers don’t capture how groups move: A large group of 20 people might splinter into smaller groups, especially if agents are pursuing them, and the tower doesn’t keep track of everyone. If someone’s missed, he says, “that person stays behind in the brush, out of sight.” Then they might pass out—which could be a death sentence in the desert. 

And though Border Patrol says the towers can “hand off” surveillance of people from one tower to another, agents on the ground say that people are often missed during these handoffs. On top of that, the algorithms remain imperfect, according to Jason Owens, the chief of Border Patrol from June 2023 to March 2025. “We never really got to the point of ‘Set it and forget it,’” he says.

Agents also say they were just stretched too thin to respond effectively. Around 2022 and 2023, the border saw historically high levels of migration. Title 42, a policy that began under Trump and continued under Biden until May 2023, cited a public health emergency to expel migrants before they could apply for asylum. But the rapid expulsions carried fewer of the repercussions that could normally follow an apprehension, and many people simply tried to cross again.

Meanwhile, asylum claims had been rising for years, while shifts in US immigration policy and in the places migrants where originating from meant more people required lengthy processing rather than being quickly returned across the border or to their home countries. That increasingly tied up agents with people who had already been apprehended, they said, leaving fewer available to respond to surveillance alerts. 

In other words, from the agents’ perspective, the effectiveness of Anduril’s towers was limited by the same issue that had always caused trouble: There just weren’t enough agents.

But the overwhelming demands on agents cannot explain all the deaths our investigation found. In 2024, the border started to get quiet again. By July of that year, the number of Border Patrol encounters nationwide had plummeted from their highs in December 2022. Encounters in the El Paso sector, where the Anduril towers in New Mexico were located, had fallen to nearly one-tenth of their peak. Agents were less tied up than they’d been in years. The technology was supposedly improving, too. 

Galvan had left for a promotion by this time, but he says agents had come to trust the towers more, and they helped train the algorithm by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down if the system identified something correctly or incorrectly. There was also a new smartphone program: Every agent at the station was given an Android device with a map of where other agents were, and it sent alerts from the station about what an Anduril tower detected. 

Despite all this, the deaths near towers continued. There was Morales in April, whose body Border Patrol learned about only from the landfill workers, though it had lain for hours within sight of an Anduril tower. 

Others were discovered by luck. 

On June 20, Border Patrol agents were mistakenly tracking a group of people they thought might be migrants, though they were in fact employees of the same landfill. Those employees told the agents they had come across a body, which turned out to be partially mummified remains of a man in his 40s who died within range of two Anduril towers. 

Three days later, on the 23rd, another: the body of a 21-year-old Guatemalan man discovered by agents while on patrol, 1.3 miles from a tower across clear and open desert. Two days after that, another: An agent was looking for a lost person when he came across the remains of a 56-year-old man—just a football field’s distance from the previous one, with a similarly clear and unobstructed view to a tower.

So if Santa Teresa had gotten quieter—and become something of a showcase for Border Patrol’s newest technology efforts—what was going on?

“Agents review the information and determine the appropriate response—the technology does not make law enforcement decisions,” Beckham, CBP’s assistant commissioner, said. Meanwhile, individual agents described scenarios where they might not prioritize responding to alerts.

Sometimes “hanging back” was a strategy: Agents might observe a group to see what route they would take, or agents might not respond to a small group, in case those people had been sent by smugglers to distract from a larger group coming behind them. Other times, agents might deem the location where a group of migrants had first been spotted to be impractical for an apprehension, and instead wait to intercept them at another location.

Knowing someone’s location didn’t always lead to immediate action. Volunteers describe providing Border Patrol with the coordinates of someone who was lost but alive and then waiting, “sometimes [for] a week,” for agents to reach the location, says Garcia Grewal, from Eagle Pass, Texas. They might be told “Oh, so-and-so went out there and they found remains,” she recalls. “Well, they weren’t remains when we called you. They were alive.”

Mireya Morales, the younger sister of José Morales Bernal, who died by the landfill on the day before his birthday in April 2024, wasn’t aware her brother died near several surveillance towers, or that the government said these towers could save lives. “Well that’s good,” she said of that promise, “but in this case, it didn’t help my brother. And there’s no way to know exactly how things played out.”

“Border Patrol should have found him quickly,” she says, “and they could have done something.” If they did, this journey into the United States—his fourth trip—likely would have ended with his apprehension, detention, and deportation to Mexico. But he would have seen the birthday texts that his sister sent the next day. At least he would have made it home to celebrate his eldest daughter’s quinceañera, which took place earlier this year.

Stories like this are why Iván Chaar López, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who leads its Border Tech Lab, says he’d “rather talk about harms” than about “the failure of an algorithm.” He adds, “A system may fail, but humans suffer.” 

Stories of some of the people that died near Anduril’s autonomous surveillance towers

What happens next

Ultimately, any attempt to understand where things are going wrong is hampered by an institutional reluctance to measure the problem.

A complete audit of this virtual wall can only come from Border Patrol. The agency is, in some ways, increasingly equipped to take on that task: Agents told us that each time they apprehend someone, the location is logged with GPS coordinates, as are instances when Border Patrol sees evidence that someone crossed but cannot find them. It also has precise data on when each surveillance tower went up, which alerts came in, and how they were resolved. Having that information is the only way to measure whether the newest towers are truly missing fewer people than the previous generations. 

But researchers and outside oversight agencies say this ocean of data hasn’t translated into a reliable system for measuring the effectiveness of the virtual wall. For example, CBP records the people it misses by logging “gotaways,” a tally of how many times agents see signs of someone who evaded apprehension—footprints, appearances on camera, reports from other people who were apprehended. It’s imperfect. And that creates room for interpretation.

“The goals with border enforcement have always been a moving target,” says Jeremy Slack, a researcher of migration and border issues at the University of Texas at El Paso. “They’re always set up so that it’s a win-win.” If apprehensions go up, for example, CBP says it means agents have gotten more effective at catching people. If apprehensions go down, it means the border is quiet because people are too scared to cross. 

That’s not to mention the conflicting ideas within the agency about what the virtual wall was supposed to accomplish. Borkowski says higher-ups would ask how many fewer agents they could get by with if they built more towers. But supervisors receiving new towers told us they’d often ask for more agents, not fewer, because they now had more activity to respond to that had previously gone unseen. 

And if the goal was for the sight of the towers to deter people from crossing to begin with, an external study from RAND in 2020 was ambiguous: It found that deploying IFTs resulted in lower apprehension levels nearby but said this didn’t mean the towers were actually deterring crossings. (Research by Boyce and colleagues found that earlier surveillance towers in southern Arizona pushed people to seek more difficult terrain out of view.) It leads to a question: Do the deaths near the virtual wall constitute unacceptable surveillance failures, or are they within the range of effectiveness the government deems acceptable? (CBP’s response did not address our questions on how it explains these deaths.)

Against this backdrop, the Government Accountability Office and DHS’s Office of the Inspector General have tried to focus on a narrower question: Is the virtual wall increasing the likelihood of apprehensions? 

The answer has been incomplete since 2014. That’s when the GAO first suggested that whenever agents log their activity in Border Patrol’s database, they should include information about whether or not a piece of technology helped in their apprehension. This could at least do something to show Congress whether the technology is working. Border Patrol began collecting that information, but years of incremental improvements have been followed by repeated findings that the resulting data is unreliable or insufficient to determine how well the technology works. The reality, several people from Border Patrol told MIT Technology Review, is that agents see it as a chore demanded only by bureaucrats who don’t understand the realities of the border. 

It’s “spitting in the wind, to be honest,” a former high-ranking official at DHS during the Biden administration told MIT Technology Review on background. “If we have 10,000 people a day crossing in between the ports of entry, do you think an agent is worried about telling them how they freaking apprehended those people?” Several other officials said that the logging of technology assists had improved, but not consistently enough to help much with analysis. 

And there is no procedure—at the local or national level—to examine individual deaths near the towers or analyze them collectively for surveillance failures. “We never thought about plotting [migrant deaths] to see if the towers were missing things or agents were missing people,” said a former CBP official who evaluated how personnel handled deaths in custody.

“Nobody ever raised the issue,” the official said, adding that doing so could reveal important gaps in the agency’s approach: “If I still worked for CBP, and you brought it up, I would probably send some people to look.”

In response to questions from MIT Technology Review, CBP said that autonomous surveillance towers complement physical barriers by improving detection and situational awareness. Its statement did not address questions about its other technologies, or broader criticisms about how it evaluates the virtual wall.

This lack of measurement has not slowed the enthusiasm for more technology funding. The government spending bill passed in July 2025 awarded $2.7 billion for border security technology alone, and CBP was quick to signal to industry that the money would soon start flowing. “We’ve got an historic investment in infrastructure and technology coming up,” a CBP director told tech companies in an industry webinar that month. In a December 2025 interview, when he was director of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute, Cooper Smith described the technology investments as “fortifying” the border against a future president who might be, in his estimation, weaker on the border than Trump. (According to LegiStorm, a research organization that focuses on political staffers, Smith now serves in a policy-focused role with CBP.) The number of Border Patrol agents has climbed too, to nearly 21,500 agents as of June 2026—the highest in the agency’s history. 

In the Big Bend region of Texas, surveillance towers are becoming a focus of local politics: Officials and residents across party lines, including the sheriff of Terrell County, are asking for Anduril towers instead of a controversial new border barrier project that’s recently been halted.

CBP has announced a desire to spend $1 billion on nearly 1,500 more towers by 2034. The law now requires all these towers to be equipped with AI. In December 2025, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey said the towers remained the company’s best-selling product, one that gives “basically perfect situational awareness of what’s going on in the area.” Anduril’s towers have been sold abroad—to enforce the UK’s borders, defend US Marine Corps bases in Japan and elsewhere, and serve as drone defenses for an Australian Air Force base. 

But as for CBP, Anduril will no longer be the only game in town; General Dynamics has now released AI towers of its own and received an order for them in June from CBP worth up to $115 million. The Electronic Frontier Foundation—which has tracked surveillance towers since 2022—says some have already been spotted at the border.

This time around, the agency will be spending this money with even less oversight than it had just a couple of years ago. In October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, dissolved its department-level office that oversaw major spending programs.

---

Most of the records on human remains that MIT Technology Review collected were current only through the fall of 2025 or, in a handful of cases, early 2026. Even those dates come with a caveat: Many remains are never found, and others are found months after someone died. The reports can then take months to be released via public record requests. That makes it nearly impossible to keep track of how many people have died near surveillance towers in anything close to real time.

Still, the border today is significantly quieter. The latest figures from DHS show just 128,009 “enforcement encounters” from January to August 2026, compared with more than 2.4 million during the same period in 2024 (“encounters” count each of Border Patrol’s interactions, not individual people).

Even as border crossing rates decrease and DHS speeds ahead with its tower acquisition plans, people are still dying within range of the surveillance towers.   

On September 14 2025, a 30-year-old Mexican woman named Graciela Gómez Hernández died just over 350 yards away from the physical border wall that separated Southern California from Tijuana—and within one mile of an RVSS tower. Earlier that afternoon, she had told her family that she could not walk any further, and her voice notes abruptly stopped. 

Her skeletonized remains were recovered nearly three weeks later, on October 4. Some of her bones were missing, and there was “apparent animal activity … to the ribs,” as the medical examiner’s report read. 

Sara Stroud, an organizer with the Borderlands Relief Collective, a volunteer humanitarian group that leaves water and supplies in a wilderness area frequented by people crossing the border, went to the site of her death a few days later to put up a memorial cross. A Border Patrol helicopter showed up almost immediately, flying low circles above the volunteers. 

Between the helicopter and the RVSS tower that was visible in the background, “I was astounded about how we were being surveilled the whole time,” Stroud says, adding that this was especially stark in contrast to the agency’s often slow—or absent—responses to people who’d died on camera. 

“Are you telling me you didn’t see it or you did see it?” she asks. “Because if you did see it, that’s horrible. And if they can’t, then how do you explain that?”

Additional reporting by Lillian Perlmutter.

This work was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. Now he likens the experience to having “a thought that is not my thought.” Divine words echo in his mind like a line from a movie or the memory of a loved one’s voice. “It’s not ‘You better do this,’” he says. “It’s just a knowing inside you: This is what you do.”

Holy messages arrive daily while Eli is praying, reading, or watching television. Sometimes they surface in prophetic dreams or missives from strangers. Occasionally, they appear midsentence, when he pauses to ask, “Lord, what do you want to say here?” 

Eli’s wife, Kaitlyn, tends to get heavenly dispatches in the shower, when she finally has a moment to herself. Other times, she seeks counsel from above. “I’ll be writing in my journal and praying and asking questions and just believing what I’m hearing is Him,” she says. 

God’s directives have been manifold. According to the Regalados, He told them to get married, buy a house, and start having kids. When Eli owned a marketing firm in Colorado, He told him what to name it, whom to hire, and which clients to take on. Then God told him to start preaching in his living room and online. Always, the couple obeyed. 

In 2021, when Eli was 41 and Kaitlyn was 28, divine guidance steered them in an unexpected new direction: crypto. 

That October, the Regalados later testified in court, Eli’s sister and her husband gifted the couple some of their holdings in a little-known digital coin. “Take this to my people for a wealth transfer,” Eli heard God say. He and Kaitlyn felt that they were being called to sell the cryptocurrency to fellow Christians. 

Later, though they had no background in crypto, they came to believe that God wanted them to launch their own coin. Learning as they went, the Regalados created a new cryptocurrency called INDXcoin, which they promoted through family, friends, and contacts in evangelical Christian circles. “I was really feeling that this is the wave of the future,” says Debbie Bonilla, a retired pharmacy technician in her 70s who bought INDXcoin with her husband, Jose. The couple learned about the currency through friends—a minister and his wife, who had also invested. “We just trusted that their judgment was good,” Jose says.

Starting in November 2022, Debbie and Jose withdrew a total of $70,000 from their retirement accounts—a large share of their nest egg—to buy INDXcoin. In all, more than 500 people handed over a total of more than $3 million to the Regalados.

But within a year after the Bonillas bought in, the project collapsed. Investors who had entrusted the Regalados with large sums of cash lost it all, leaving many to wonder where the funds went and some to question whether they had fallen victim to an elaborate fraud.

“Poof—the money just evaporated,” Debbie told me. “Like, how does that happen?”

---

Though Eli believed God was leading him into crypto, he claims he was initially apprehensive. “Absolutely not,” he recalls thinking. “I don’t know anything about cryptocurrency, and I don’t want to be caught up in some church scam.”

The crypto market was booming, and the Regalados knew people who’d made a fortune investing in early-stage coins. But a growing interest in digital assets also meant a rise in crypto fraud. 

In 2025, crypto scammers collected at least $14 billion worldwide, a 17% increase from the previous year, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. And in the United States, victims of fraudulent crypto investment schemes reported $7.2 billion in losses to the 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.”

---

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.

---

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.”

---

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.” 

---

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.” 

---

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?”

---

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.”

---

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.