Katia Savchuk: Reporting on the Rise of Crypto Fraud

So yeah, just to get us started, what inspired your investigation?

So I had coffee with Amanda Silverman, who's an editor at MIT Tech Review, and she had seen a headline in the New York Times that was just a brief news story about this pastor who had claimed that God told him to launch a cryptocurrency and was being charged in a criminal case, was being accused of fraud.

It just seemed like a very bizarre, fascinating story because he had actually made a video and essentially said, we created a cryptocurrency with no clear exit we used the money for home renovations and god told us to do it so um you know it sounded on the one hand just like a fascinating story but it was also the confluence of so many things that are really salient in society you know right now there's a rise in crypto fraud um obviously a lot of hype around crypto.

The regulation hasn't necessarily caught up to the spread of crypto.

And there's also kind of the rise of religious influencers online.

There's the rise of charismatic Christianity, which is kind of a strain where people Feel they have a really direct personal relationship with God.

They're speaking in tongues.

There's.

Feeling that God is directing you personally to take certain actions.

And maybe a distressed and sort of fact based thinking in some cases.

So.

It seems like a really important arena to understand that this case could be a way to do that.

And to me, I was also just personally really fascinated in the idea of blind faith, which is something that I ended up seeing in Eli and Caitlin Regalado, the couple at the center of this case, and also a lot of their investors and also in a lot of kind of corners of our society right now, where we can basically sort of blindly believe things and sometimes it can lead us astray.

So yeah, just to get us started, what inspired your investigation?

So I had coffee with Amanda Silverman, who's an editor at MIT Tech Review, and she had seen a headline in the New York Times that was just a brief news story about this pastor who had claimed that God told him to launch a cryptocurrency and was being charged in a criminal case, was being accused of fraud.

It just seemed like a very bizarre, fascinating story because he had actually made a video and essentially said, we created a cryptocurrency with no clear exit we used the money for home renovations and god told us to do it so um you know it sounded on the one hand just like a fascinating story but it was also the confluence of so many things that are really salient in society you know right now there's a rise in crypto fraud um obviously a lot of hype around crypto.

The regulation hasn't necessarily caught up to the spread of crypto.

And there's also kind of the rise of religious influencers online.

There's the rise of charismatic Christianity, which is kind of a strain where people Feel they have a really direct personal relationship with God.

They're speaking in tongues.

There's.

Feeling that God is directing you personally to take certain actions.

And maybe a distressed and sort of fact based thinking in some cases.

So.

It seems like a really important arena to understand that this case could be a way to do that.

And to me, I was also just personally really fascinated in the idea of blind faith, which is something that I ended up seeing in Eli and Caitlin Regalado, the couple at the center of this case, and also a lot of their investors and also in a lot of kind of corners of our society right now, where we can basically sort of blindly believe things and sometimes it can lead us astray.