A former FBI counterintelligence supervisor has pleaded guilty to stealing about 2.47 million dollars in cryptocurrency from wallets linked to federal investigations, in a case that exposed how one agent used the bureau's own systems against it.

Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, pleaded guilty on 5 November in federal court in Alexandria to wire fraud and money laundering. According to his plea, he drained wallets linked to subjects of criminal investigations, adversarial nation-state actors, and at least one wallet the FBI itself had created for an operation.

The scale of the theft is far larger than first alleged. When Yaroch was charged in August, prosecutors put the loss at roughly 1 million dollars. The plea documents put the total at 2,474,380.66 dollars, spread across about 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials connected to 35 separate FBI investigations. Court documents filed with the plea say some of that money belonged to at least ten victims of financial crimes the bureau was investigating.

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 in February 2025. 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, swapping the stolen coins into other crypto assets and carrying out further transactions to obscure their origin.

Part of the money went on everyday spending. Between 25 November 2025 and 13 January 2026, he transferred about 93,082 dollars into one of his accounts and shuffled money among others to cover credit cards, car payments and other loans.

Prosecutors rejected any suggestion that Yaroch acted from principle. Court records show he had asked ChatGPT where to build a new life in Europe and lined up travel to Portugal, and on 15 June he gave Portuguese lawyers power of attorney to register him with tax authorities. He had already travelled to Portugal in May without disclosing the trip to the federal government. Prosecutors wrote in a filing that although he initially claimed he stole the crypto out of frustration, he should not be viewed as a selfless Robin Hood figure, adding that the evidence showed he planned to use the cryptocurrency for his own personal enrichment.

Yaroch first confessed to a Department of Justice National Security Division employee on 29 July, 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. The FBI terminated him on 31 July.

Agents 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, they found hundreds of thousands of dollars still parked.

Yaroch is scheduled to be sentenced on 4 March 2027 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.

He is not the first US investigator accused of treating an operation's crypto stash as a personal wallet. More than a decade ago, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Force and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges were charged with stealing bitcoin they encountered during the investigation of the darknet market Silk Road. Force later pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering and obstruction and was sentenced to more than six years, while Bridges received nearly six years. Earlier this year, prosecutors also charged John Daghita, the son of an executive whose company helped the US Marshals Service store seized crypto assets, with allegedly stealing tens of millions of dollars from that stockpile.