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.
How the FBI credentials turned into cash
Beginning no later than December 2024, Yaroch used that access to move coins out of those wallets and into ones he controlled. After the transfers, he swapped the stolen cryptocurrency into other digital assets and ran further transactions meant to obscure its source, nature and ownership.
Between Nov. 25, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, he moved about $93,082 into one of his accounts, then shuffled funds among other accounts to cover debts, including credit cards, car payments and loans, the office said.
FOX 5 DC, citing the same U.S. Attorney’s Office release, noted the Portugal planning that appears in the plea papers. Yaroch asked ChatGPT how to maximize investment returns and where to live in the European Union. After the chatbot suggested buying a vineyard in Portugal, he gave Portuguese lawyers a power of attorney on June 15, 2026, to register him with the Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority, obtain a tax identification number and collect the password to his finance portal. He arranged travel to Portugal for September 2026.
What the plea says the FBI lost
The agreed statement of facts goes beyond the dollar figure. Yaroch’s conduct compromised multiple FBI investigations into criminal groups and nation-state adversaries, the office said, and it compromised FBI sources and methods used in foreign intelligence collection and criminal cases. It also “deprived FBI employees of their ability to carry out their functions to protect public safety and national security.”
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Theophani K. Stamos and Daniel S. Wierzbicki, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence Division, announced the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathleen Robeson and Russell Carlberg are prosecuting, with help from the National Security Cyber Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and the DOJ inspector general’s Mid-Atlantic region. The case is 1:26-CR-208 in the Eastern District of Virginia.
The admission lands in a week when federal crypto-crime stories keep stacking up — from a failed bitcoin kidnapping plot that produced its own guilty plea last month to FBI tallies putting U.S. crypto fraud losses above $11 billion in 2025, a figure the White House has used to frame a wider crackdown.
What sentencing will do with the gap between Yaroch’s July self-report and the $2.47 million plea figure is still open. So is how many of the 35 FBI cases can be repaired after an insider treated the bureau’s own wallet credentials as a personal ATM. March 4, 2027, is when Judge Giles gets to answer the first question.
