ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A former FBI supervisory special agent, Patrick Steven Yaroch, pleaded guilty on Thursday, November 5, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to wire fraud and money laundering, admitting that he stole approximately $2.47 million in cryptocurrency using wallet credentials he obtained through his work on FBI investigations, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
According to the Justice Department, Yaroch carried out about 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials linked to 35 separate investigations. The wallets he drew from included wallets controlled by subjects of FBI investigations, wallets controlled by adversarial nation-state actors, and at least one wallet the FBI itself had created for operations.
How case access became spending power
The earliest detailed account of the method is in an August 1 court affidavit archived by CourtListener. In it, Yaroch told investigators that he searched FBI holdings, memorised wallet passphrases, and then transferred the funds to a wallet of his own. A memorised passphrase is enough to move cryptocurrency: whoever holds a wallet's secret credentials can spend its funds, whether or not they have any legal right to them.
Source: Coindoo, reporting the DOJ announcement and the August 1 affidavit
Pre-plea reporting by The Washington Post, carried by PANews, said Yaroch held Top Secret clearance and worked with counterintelligence case material, which gave him access to internal FBI systems holding the seed phrases — the master credentials — for wallets the bureau was watching. Prosecutors also said he used ChatGPT to plan a move to Portugal and, in May and June of 2026, consulted it about how to invest the money.
Source: PANews, reporting The Washington Post
The scheme ended, investigators say, with a confession. Reporting based on the court filings says Yaroch, citing feelings of guilt, confessed to a Department of Justice employee. He was placed on administrative leave, then dismissed from the FBI, and was arrested on July 31, 2026.
What investigators recovered — and what is still unaccounted for
On July 31, investigators moved approximately $925,400 from Yaroch-controlled accounts into government-controlled cryptocurrency wallets, the affidavit records, and about $165,600 in U.S. dollars remained in his Kraken exchange account at that point. The November plea announcement gives no updated recovery total, so it is not possible to say from the public record how much of the $2.47 million is still missing, particularly after asset conversions and months of changing cryptocurrency prices.
The Justice Department says Yaroch's conduct also compromised investigations, and intelligence sources and methods. It has not identified the affected cases or estimated the operational damage — harm that returning the cryptocurrency cannot by itself repair.
Background: an insider risk the FBI has seen before
Yaroch is not the first U.S. federal agent convicted of stealing cryptocurrency from an investigation. In 2015, former DEA special agent Carl M. Force diverted about $700,000 in Bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation, pleaded guilty and received a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence. The Yaroch case is larger in dollar terms and, on the plea record, wider: credentials from 35 investigations, not one. Control specialists note that the case turns on a simple question for any agency that stores wallet secrets — whether an employee who needs to examine evidence can also obtain everything required to spend it. The public record does not describe the FBI's credential storage or what has changed since the theft.
What happens next
Sentencing is scheduled for March 4, 2027, and Yaroch faces up to 20 years in prison. The sentencing hearing is the next point at which the court record could set a final forfeiture or restitution figure — the first complete accounting of the stolen assets. For Awaaz Punjab's readers, including Punjabi business owners and truckers who hold or move money in digital assets, the case is a reminder that the weakest point in cryptocurrency security is rarely the technology: it is the person trusted with the keys.