Bitcoin Magazine
Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Stealing $2.47 Million in Crypto From Investigations
A former FBI agent pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing about $2.47 million in cryptocurrency with wallet credentials the bureau had collected in its own cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced.
Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, entered pleas to wire fraud and money laundering in federal court in Alexandria. U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles accepted the plea. He faces up to 20 years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing on March 4, 2027.
Court papers put the illicit haul at $2,474,380.66. Prosecutors say Yaroch made roughly 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials tied to 35 separate FBI investigations, drawing on wallets controlled by investigation subjects, adversarial nation-state actors and at least one wallet the FBI itself had created for an operation.
The Justice Department Office of the Inspector General had flagged the case in August after Yaroch’s arrest on a criminal complaint. That earlier account described a smaller set of transfers — about 10 moves totaling roughly $1 million — and noted that Yaroch self-reported the activity to two department employees on July 29, 2026. The plea figures are larger.
From 2017 through early 2025, Yaroch worked in the FBI Boston Division on a squad focused on an adversarial nation-state. From February 2025 through July 31, 2026, he served in the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division at headquarters, with access to systems that stored cryptocurrency credentials gathered in investigations.
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