The agent whose job was to track a hostile foreign power’s crypto wallets is accused of robbing them himself. Patrick Steven Yaroch, a 37-year-old supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division with a Top Secret clearance, was arrested in Virginia and charged with stealing roughly $1 million in cryptocurrency from the very accounts he was assigned to investigate.
From 2017 to 2025, Yaroch worked in the FBI’s Boston Division on a national security squad monitoring a person from a country the criminal complaint identifies only as “an adversarial nation.” NBC News reported the target was Russia. Prosecutors say that in late 2024, Yaroch grew frustrated that the bureau could not — or would not — shut down the target’s use of those crypto accounts, so he decided to handle it himself. He allegedly pulled seed phrases (the word list that unlocks a wallet) from internal FBI records, memorized them, and moved the funds into a personal wallet across roughly ten to twelve transactions, routing them through the exchange Kraken and the Sui-based DeFi platform Suilend.
The scheme held up for nearly two years and unraveled almost by accident: Yaroch confessed to a colleague on July 28, 2026, and agents searched his home in Ashburn on August 3, recovering $925,426 — more than 90% of what was allegedly taken. He now faces federal charges of interstate transportation and receipt of stolen property, and the FBI has fired him.
There’s a bitter irony here. The same blockchain transparency Yaroch relied on as an investigator is what caught him — moving a large sum through an exchange and a DeFi platform leaves a trail that forensic analysts can follow. It echoes a 2015 case in which Secret Service and DEA agents investigating the Silk Road marketplace skimmed seized bitcoin for themselves and were later convicted.
Investigators also found ChatGPT searches in Yaroch’s history about relocating to Portugal, Greece and Turkey, along with undisclosed trips to Germany, Portugal and Grenada. The case is still under investigation, and the FBI has acknowledged the breach may have compromised the very surveillance operation it was meant to protect.
