Ex-FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to $2.47 Million Crypto Theft

Former FBI agent Patrick Steven Yaroch pleaded guilty on Nov. 5 to wire fraud and money laundering over the theft of about $2.47 million in cryptocurrency, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said, according to Unchained and FOX 5 DC.

Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Va., entered a plea covering roughly 100 fraudulent transfers using wallet credentials linked to 35 FBI investigations, prosecutors said in the plea materials summarized by those outlets. The wallets included accounts tied to subjects of other probes, adversarial nation-state actors and at least one wallet the FBI built for an operation, the agreed statement of facts says, as reported.

How prosecutors describe the scheme

Yaroch had access to FBI systems that stored crypto credentials collected in investigations. Beginning no later than December 2024, he moved funds out of those wallets, converted them into other tokens and ran further transactions to disguise the trail, according to the plea's statement of facts. Between Nov. 25, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, he moved about $93,082 into one of his accounts and used funds to pay debts such as card balances and car payments, Unchained reported from the Justice Department materials.

The $2.47 million figure is more than double what he first told FBI headquarters in July, when an affidavit recounted his claim of about 10 transfers into a wallet holding roughly $1 million. The Justice Department Office of the Inspector General said he was arrested Aug. 4 on a criminal complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia after self-reporting activity in late July. Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles accepted the plea (Case No. 1:26-CR-208). Sentencing is set for March 4, 2027. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

Sentencing is March 4, 2027. The plea locks in the $2.47 million figure and the 35-case credential count that the July self-report understated.