Ex-FBI agent pleads guilty in the second insider theft of government-held crypto this year

A former FBI agent has pleaded guilty to stealing about $2.47 million in crypto from FBI investigations.

Patrick Steven Yaroch admitted to wire fraud and money laundering. He admitted that he stole more than double the $1 million he first stated when he came forward in July.

How did a former FBI agent steal $2.47 million in crypto?

Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing about $2.47 million in crypto seized by the FBI during investigations. Yaroch first confessed to a Justice Department colleague in late July, admitting that he had moved money about 10 to 12 times into one wallet worth around $1 million. 

He said he was not sure of the exact total because he had mixed the money with his own investment gains. He said the shame was “eating him up inside” and that he wanted to “get it off his chest.”

The guilty plea shows the theft was much bigger. The Justice Department said he made about 100 fraudulent transfers using wallet credentials from 35 separate FBI investigations. He then moved the money through swaps and more transactions to hide where it came from. Some of it went to credit card bills, car payments and other loans.

Yaroch worked at the FBI’s Boston office from 2017 to early 2025. He was on a team that investigated an unnamed foreign enemy of the U.S. NBC News (owned by Comcast, NASDAQ: CMCSA) said that country was Russia. 

He later moved to the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. There, he could open internal systems that stored crypto wallet keys collected during cases.

Yaroch told investigators that he first read up on how crypto wallets work and made wallets of his own. Next, he looked through FBI files for account information and remembered the secret phrases that unlock the funds. No hacking was needed. The keys were sitting in an FBI system, and he copied them.

Agents found chats where Yaroch asked ChatGPT what to do with about $1 million and how to live in an EU country. The chatbot’s idea was to buy a vineyard in Portugal, and he went on to hire lawyers there to get him a tax number. 

Agents searched Yaroch’s home in Ashburn and found a Trezor crypto device, handwritten recovery phrases, a Portuguese legal document giving someone power to act for him, and three passports. 

He could get up to 20 years in prison and is due for sentencing on March 4, 2027.

Is this the first time a government insider has stolen seized crypto?

Yaroch’s case is the second this year in which someone with government access was caught taking crypto the U.S. government controlled. In early March, the FBI arrested John “Lick” Daghita on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. He is accused of taking more than $46 million from the U.S. Marshals Service. 

Daghita is the son of the chief executive of Command Services & Support, a Virginia company that held a Marshals contract to help manage and sell seized digital assets, Cryptopolitan reported. On-chain investigator ZachXBT exposed him after he showed off $23 million in a Telegram group chat. 

In an older incident, Shaun Bridges, a former Secret Service agent, and Carl Force, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, worked on a Baltimore task force investigating the Silk Road marketplace. 

Bridges pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for stealing more than $800,000 in Bitcoin during that case.  He was later accused of taking another $700,000 from a Secret Service account months after he was first charged.