A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent allegedly took $1 million in seized cryptocurrencies before turning himself in, according to court records.
Documents unsealed this week allege Patrick Steven Yaroch, who was a FBI Supervisory Special Agent working at the FBI Headquarters Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, claimed he “was frustrated that the FBI could not or would not act against adversarial cryptocurrency accounts.”
He then proceeded to “take matters into his own hands,” according to the affidavit filed with a district court in Virginia, and transfer $925,426.07 in crypto to his personal wallets over numerous transactions.
Yaroch then allegedly toyed with the idea of retiring in Portugal with his wife, court documents claim, citing his ChatGPT history, but later confessed to a Department of Justice employee what he had done.
“Yaroch told DOJ employee 1 that he made some very poor decisions related to cryptocurrency wallets,” court documents read. “Yaroch said that he went into FBI systems and found keys needed to transfer money from wallets to himself.”
A motion for a detention order, made public on Tuesday, added: “The weight of the evidence against the defendant is strong. He confessed to stealing the cryptocurrency from the adverse nations’ wallets.”
Court filings further allege that Yaroch “previously had access to some of the nation’s most secret and important information. He then chose to misuse this information to steal money, for his own financial gain.”
It adds that the defendant has been charged with two felonies that carry a maximum penalty of 10 years of incarceration each.
The nation in question has not been named in the documents.
The court documents made public this week only briefly mention that Yaroch had a tiny amount of Bitcoin in his Kraken account; the vast majority of his funds were held in stablecoins.
Yaroch, from Ashburn, Virginia was fired from the FBI on July 31, and investigations are ongoing, according to the court documents.