A senior FBI official has pleaded guilty to stealing millions in cryptocurrency from wallets controlled by nation-state hackers and by victims of crimes. According to The Record, Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, admitted using his position on an FBI investigative squad to take more than $2.4 million to cover his debts. He faces up to 20 years in prison on wire fraud and money laundering charges and will be sentenced in March.
The report says Yaroch used his seniority to reach FBI systems holding the codes and passwords needed to move cryptocurrency from at least two adversarial nations and from 10 crime victims. From December 2024 he made 100 transfers from 79 wallets connected to 35 FBI investigations, in amounts from 81 cents to more than $580,000. Prosecutors said the misuse of the credentials “compromised multiple FBI investigations related to both criminal groups and nation state adversaries” and exposed the FBI’s sources and methods to the targets who controlled the wallets.
Prosecutors said the Justice Department gained access to his ChatGPT conversations, which showed he planned to buy a vineyard in Portugal and retire, and that he bought plane tickets for September for himself, his wife and his child. He instead confessed to a DOJ employee he knew from a previous job in July, saying it was “eating him up inside.” The Record says he told that employee he had been angry that he could not do more to disrupt a suspect’s use of cryptocurrency from an unnamed adversarial nation.
Sources
- The Record: FBI agent pleads guilty to stealing $2.4 million in crypto from nation-state hackers (the article did not link a Justice Department release, so all facts are attributed to The Record)