An FBI counterintelligence agent is accused of taking $1m in crypto from the wallets he was watching

A supervisory special agent in the FBI's counterintelligence and espionage division has been charged with moving roughly a million dollars in cryptocurrency out of wallets belonging to foreign adversaries and into accounts of his own.

The accused is Patrick Yaroch. According to the arrest affidavit, filed on 1 August, he used intelligence he could reach through bureau systems to obtain the passphrases that controlled those wallets, then made about a dozen transfers beginning in late 2024 or early 2025. The FBI dismissed him on 31 July.

Every one of those specifics comes from a charging document. An affidavit is a prosecutor's account of what they believe they can prove; it is not a finding, and Yaroch has not been convicted of anything. That distinction is the whole story at this stage, and it is the first thing that tends to disappear when a case like this is summarised.

The alleged motive, as described in the affidavit, is not simple enrichment. Investigators say Yaroch had grown frustrated that the bureau was either unwilling or unable to disrupt the cryptocurrency holdings of an unnamed adversarial state. That framing — an agent who concluded the institution would not act and decided to act himself — is what separates this from an ordinary embezzlement case, if it holds up.

The scheme is said to have come apart through a confession rather than through detection. Reporting indicates he told a Justice Department colleague in late July, describing it as something he needed to get off his chest. Investigators searched his residence and recovered a sum reported at $925,426.07 from wallets and accounts.

He faces two charges: interstate transportation of stolen goods, securities and money, and receipt of stolen goods, securities and money. Notably, neither is an espionage or classified-information offence, which is worth registering given the division he worked in. The charges as filed treat this as theft.

Two things follow that are more consequential than the money. The first is a counterintelligence question the bureau will have to answer internally: if the affidavit is accurate, an agent reached operational intelligence about adversary financial infrastructure and used it privately, over a period of months, without a control catching it. The second is evidentiary. Assets seized from a suspect are not the same as assets returned, and cryptocurrency taken from foreign adversarial wallets does not have an obvious party to return it to.

What is not known at this point is substantial: whether he has entered a plea, who represents him, which district is handling the prosecution, and whether the FBI will say anything about how the access went unnoticed. Open News will update this page as the case moves and as documents beyond the affidavit become available.