FBI agent accused of leveraging classified intel in $1 million crypto theft

Published August 3, 2026 3:10pm ET



An FBI agent who had been with the bureau since 2017 was arrested Friday and charged with transferring around $1 million in cryptocurrency to his personal wallet. 

The FBI’s arrest affidavit, which it filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Saturday, describes Patrick Steven Yaroch as a supervisory special agent in the counterintelligence and espionage division. Yaroch allegedly grew dissatisfied that the FBI was unwilling or unable to disrupt an unnamed adversarial nation’s cryptocurrency accounts.

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