A look at Argentinian crypto company Generación Zoe and its pastor founder Leonardo Cositorto, who is accused of a $120M+ Zoe Cash cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme
Facundo Iglesia / Rest of World : Tweets: @restofworld and @restofworld Tweets: @restofworld : Generación Zoe brought in hundreds of millions in investments by promising a gold-backed cryptocurrency and robots that could predict the stock market. Prosecutors say it was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Read our new feature by @facundoiglesia https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : From 2020-2022, countless cryptocurrencies boomed in value, then came crashing down. But few arcs were as dramatic as Generación Zoe Read how one pastor attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from thousands across Latin America, then ended up in prison https://restofworld.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Generación Zoe is the Argentine entry in a familiar crypto-scandal lineage: a charismatic founder promising an exotic asset — gold-backed Zoe Cash plus stock-predicting robots — pulling in hundreds of millions from thousands of retail believers until prosecutors called it a Ponzi scheme in the OneCoin mold. Rest of World's feature by Facundo Iglesia documents how pastor Leonardo Cositorto ended up imprisoned with over $120M raised.
The scheme fed on conditions documented in earlier coverage of the country: Argentines turning to crypto and centralized apps like Binance partly to escape government scrutiny of cash — demand for dollar alternatives that a church-branded token could exploit. The case now sits alongside the Milei-linked Libra scandal investigation as a recurring test of Argentina's tolerance for crypto promotion.
First-order effects
- Thousands of Zoe Cash investors face losses prosecutors peg above $120M, while founder Leonardo Cositorto reportedly sits in prison pending the outcome of the Ponzi charges.
Second-order effects
- Every high-profile collapse like this raises the compliance bar for the centralized intermediaries Argentines actually use — Binance and similar apps — since each scandal hands regulators evidence that retail crypto channels double as fraud conduits.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds alongside the OneCoin and Tezos arcs, community- and faith-network distribution will keep outpacing regulators in emerging markets, pushing oversight toward the on/off-ramps rather than the tokens themselves — though Argentina's dismantling of its own crypto-investigation unit shows enforcement appetite is itself unstable.
The trend: Crypto fraud keeps migrating to where trust already exists — churches, communities, black-market dollar demand — with prosecution arriving only after the money is gone.