A former FBI counterintelligence supervisor pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering on Thursday after admitting he stole about $2.47 million in crypto tied to federal investigations. According to his plea, Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, drained wallets linked to subjects of criminal investigations, adversarial nation-state actors, and at least one wallet the FBI itself created for an operation. The Washington Post also reported that documents filed with his guilty plea say some of that money belonged to at least ten victims of financial crimes the bureau was investigating.
The total is more than double the roughly $1 million prosecutors highlighted when Yaroch was first charged in August. By then, he had already been asking ChatGPT where to build a new life in Europe and lining up travel to Portugal, according to court records.
How an FBI Supervisor Emptied Investigation Wallets
Yaroch worked at the FBI Boston Division from 2017 through early 2025 on a squad focused on an adversarial nation-state, then moved into the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division from February 2025 until his termination on July 31st of this year. That posting gave him access to FBI systems holding crypto credentials collected during investigations. Beginning no later than December 2024, he used that access to move funds out of wallets associated with various investigations.
Across the scheme, he conducted about 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials related to 35 separate FBI investigations, for proceeds of approximately $2,474,380.66. After moving stolen coins, he swapped them into other crypto assets and conducted further transactions to obscure their origin. Between November 25th, 2025, and January 13th, 2026, he transferred about $93,082 into one of his accounts and shuffled money among others to cover credit cards, car payments, and other loans.
Former FBI agent Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, pled guilty today to wire fraud and money laundering related to using his access to steal cryptocurrency.@FBIWFO https://t.co/jDVtSiAM3H
— U.S. Attorney EDVA (@EDVAnews) November 5, 2026
A search-warrant affidavit filed in August fills in how agents say he got the credentials. FBI Special Agent Hope Vance wrote that Yaroch memorized passphrases from adversarial accounts, then decided to “take matters into his own hands” and send the funds into a personal wallet. He later told others he was frustrated that the FBI could not or would not act against those adversarial holdings. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathleen Robeson and Russell Carlberg pushed back on that self-image in a legal filing, writing that although he initially claimed he stole the crypto out of frustration, “he should not be viewed as a selfless Robin Hoodesque figure.” According to the Washington Post, they added, “The evidence is clear that the defendant planned to use this cryptocurrency for his own personal enrichment, just like any other fraudster.”
Yaroch first confessed to a Department of Justice National Security Division employee on July 29th, describing “very poor decisions” involving crypto wallets and saying the situation was “eating him up inside.” He then submitted an online self-report to the FBI’s Security Division, and agents arrested him two days later.
Vance’s affidavit says that during the investigation and search, investigators reviewed his ChatGPT history and found him asking the chatbot how to invest around $1 million and where to live in the European Union. One June query read, “If you had a bucket of money (around $1 million) and you wanted to leave the USA and become a resident or citizen of an EU country, what would you do?” ChatGPT ranked Portugal as its “top choice for your specific situation.”
On June 15th, Yaroch gave Portuguese lawyers power of attorney to register him with tax authorities and obtain a Portuguese tax identification number. He had already traveled to Portugal in May without disclosing the trip to the federal government, the affidavit says, and he had booked another family trip for September when he was arrested in July.
Agents also seized a Trezor-made crypto hardware wallet, multiple passports, the power-of-attorney paperwork, and handwritten notes consistent with crypto seed phrases. On Kraken and a Suilend account accessed through Slush, a wallet for the Sui blockchain, they found hundreds of thousands of dollars still parked.
Public court records do not name the adversarial nations whose wallets were drained, but North Korea would be a natural suspect. Blockchain investigators and exchanges have tied the regime’s hackers to billions of dollars worth of crypto thefts over the years, including the recent Binance and Bitget heists. The FBI itself has also pointed to North Korea as the entity behind the Binance hack. Pyongyang has previously denied accusations that they’re involved with crypto thefts, and Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, issued another denial following the recent Binance incident, going as far as to hint that the U.S. could be involved based on Trump’s push for a strategic bitcoin reserve.
Yaroch is scheduled to be sentenced in March of next year and faces up to 20 years in prison. The Justice Department says his transfers compromised multiple investigations, along with FBI sources and methods used in foreign intelligence collection and criminal cases.
Not the First Time Feds Helped Themselves to Some Crypto
Yaroch is hardly the first U.S. investigator accused of treating an operation’s crypto stash like a personal wallet. During the investigation of the darknet market Silk Road more than a decade ago, former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Carl Force and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges were charged with stealing bitcoin they encountered on the job. Force later pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering, and obstruction and was sentenced to more than six years. Bridges also received nearly six years for his own theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin connected to the Silk Road case. Notably, the convicted operator of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, was pardoned by Trump in the early days of his second term as president.
Earlier this year, prosecutors also charged John Daghita, the son of an executive whose company helped the U.S. Marshals Service store seized crypto assets, with allegedly stealing tens of millions of dollars from that stockpile.
