Ex-FBI Agent Charged with Stealing $1 Million in Crypto
A former FBI supervisory special agent has been charged with stealing nearly $1 million in cryptocurrency tied to federal investigations.
Patrick Steven Yaroch, who worked in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division and held a Top Secret security clearance, allegedly accessed FBI systems to obtain cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases connected to investigations involving a foreign adversary.
He memorized these recovery phrases rather than writing them down, and then used them to create his own wallet and move funds into it about 10 times between early 2025 and July 2026.
The stolen holdings grew to around $1 million over time. Investigators found a Trezor hardware wallet, handwritten seed phrases, and a Kraken account holding around $188,570 in Yaroch's home and devices after he broke down and admitted what he had done during a meeting at FBI headquarters on July 28, 2026.
Chat logs recovered from Yaroch's phone showed conversations with ChatGPT about investing or spending the stolen funds, as well as planning a family trip to Portugal in September 2026.