Former FBI agent pleads guilty to $2.47 million crypto theft

A former FBI agent admitted stealing $2.47 million in cryptocurrency that the bureau had seized as evidence. Patrick Steven Yaroch pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering on November 5, drawing on wallets tied to 35 federal investigations.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced the plea. Prosecutors put the total at $2,474,380.66, taken in about 100 unauthorized transfers between late 2024 and July 2026. Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, worked in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, a post that gave him access to seized wallets and the keys to move them.

How an insider drained the wallets

Yaroch held a supervisory role at FBI headquarters. His division handled counterintelligence and espionage cases, some involving cryptocurrency the bureau had taken from suspects. That work put the private keys to those wallets within his reach.

He used the access to move funds out, one wallet at a time. Prosecutors said the money came from accounts belonging to investigation subjects, from wallets tied to adversarial nation-state actors, and from at least one wallet the FBI had set up for an operation. The Block, citing court records, reported that he emptied at least 79 wallets. NBC News reported that the foreign nation named in the original complaint was Russia.

The transfers were small at first and spread out over time. That is part of why the scheme ran for roughly a year and a half before it surfaced.

From a $1 million complaint to a $2.47 million plea

Investigators raised the figure as they finished their accounting. When Yaroch was first charged in the summer of 2026, the complaint described thefts worth about $1 million, including roughly $925,000 that the government traced and moved into its own wallets. The $2,474,380.66 in the plea reflects the fuller tally across all 35 cases.

Yaroch was fired, and the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General took the lead on the investigation. A judge released him on a $50,000 bond with location monitoring while the case moved ahead. He had been with the bureau since 2017 and transferred to the counterintelligence division in early 2025.

The charges and the sentence to come

He pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. Each carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. The case was heard in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, and sentencing is set for March 4, 2027.

To cover his tracks, he swapped the stolen coins for other digital assets and routed them through a series of accounts, the Justice Department said. Some of the proceeds paid ordinary bills. Credit cards. A car loan.

Under the plea, Yaroch faces restitution and a forfeiture judgment that prosecutors have put at no less than $2.4 million. The final number is for the sentencing judge.

An insider, not a hacker

Most crypto theft runs the other way, through an outside attacker who breaks into a wallet or an exchange. Not here. Yaroch already held the keys, lawfully, because the FBI had seized the funds and trusted him to handle them.

That makes it harder to stop than a normal breach. No firewall blocks a person who is meant to have access.

Seized crypto can sit in government custody for months, sometimes years, while a case works through the courts. The plea is a reminder that the controls on those holdings rest on the people inside the room. For an ordinary holder the rule is no different: whoever controls the private key controls the coins, whether the custodian is an exchange, a wallet app, or a federal agency.

Not the first federal agent to steal seized crypto

Yaroch is not the first federal agent to take crypto he was trusted to guard. Former DEA agent Carl Mark Force stole bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation and was sentenced to six and a half years in 2015. In 2024, a former Secret Service agent, Anthony Joseph Evans, pleaded guilty to taking about $56,000 in cryptocurrency from a Phoenix evidence vault.

Those sums look small next to Yaroch's $2.47 million. What ties the cases together is the access, not the method. Each agent held lawful control of the keys. Each abused it.

What to watch

Sentencing on March 4, 2027 is the next date that counts. The guidelines range, and the final restitution and forfeiture figures, will come then.

Watch also for any change in how the FBI stores and tracks seized digital assets. The scheme ran across 35 cases and about 100 transfers before anyone caught it. Whether the bureau tightens its custody controls, and says so, is the open question. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has spelled out what, if anything, has changed since.