A former FBI agent pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing roughly $2.47 million in cryptocurrency using wallet credentials the bureau had gathered in its own investigations, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced.

Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, entered pleas to wire fraud and money laundering in federal court in Alexandria. U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles accepted the plea. He faces up to 20 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on March 4, 2027.

Court papers put the illicit proceeds at $2,474,380.66. Prosecutors say Yaroch made roughly 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials tied to 35 separate FBI investigations, drawing on wallets controlled by investigation subjects, adversarial nation-state actors and at least one wallet the FBI itself had created for an operation.

The Justice Department Office of the Inspector General flagged the case in August, after Yaroch's arrest on a criminal complaint. That earlier account described a smaller set of transfers — about 10 moves totaling roughly $1 million — and noted that Yaroch self-reported the activity to two department employees on July 29, 2026. The figures in the plea agreement are larger.

Yaroch's Path Through the FBI

From 2017 through early 2025, Yaroch worked in the FBI's Boston Division on a squad focused on an adversarial nation-state. From February 2025 through July 31, 2026, he served in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division at headquarters, with access to systems that stored cryptocurrency credentials collected during investigations. That access exists because modern crypto investigations leave the bureau holding digital assets and the credentials that move them — whether gathered from investigation subjects or created for the FBI's own operations.

How Stolen Credentials Became Cash

Beginning no later than December 2024, Yaroch used that access to move coins out of those wallets and into ones he controlled. After the transfers, he swapped the stolen cryptocurrency into other digital assets and ran further transactions meant to obscure its source, nature and ownership — the transfer, swap and conceal pattern that money laundering statutes target.

Between Nov. 25, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, he moved about $93,082 into one of his accounts, then shuffled funds among other accounts to cover debts, including credit cards, car payments and loans, the office said.

FOX 5 DC, citing the same U.S. Attorney's Office release, reported on the Portugal planning that appears in the plea papers. Yaroch asked ChatGPT how to maximize his investment returns and where to live in the European Union. After the chatbot suggested buying a vineyard in Portugal, he gave Portuguese lawyers a power of attorney on June 15, 2026, to register him with the Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority, obtain a tax identification number and collect the password to his finance portal. He arranged travel to Portugal for September 2026.

What the Plea Says the FBI Lost

The agreed statement of facts extends beyond the dollar figure. Yaroch's conduct compromised multiple FBI investigations into criminal groups and nation-state adversaries, the office said, and it compromised FBI sources and methods used in foreign intelligence collection and criminal cases. It also “deprived FBI employees of their ability to carry out their functions to protect public safety and national security.”

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Theophani K. Stamos and Daniel S. Wierzbicki, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office's Counterintelligence Division, announced the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathleen Robeson and Russell Carlberg are prosecuting, with assistance from the National Security Cyber Section of the Justice Department's National Security Division and the DOJ inspector general's Mid-Atlantic region. The case is 1:26-CR-208 in the Eastern District of Virginia.

The admission lands amid a stretch of federal crypto-crime developments — from a failed bitcoin kidnapping plot that produced its own guilty plea last month to FBI tallies putting U.S. crypto fraud losses above $11 billion in 2025, a figure the White House has used to frame a wider crackdown.

What sentencing will do about the gap between Yaroch's July self-report and the $2.47 million plea figure remains open, as does the question of how many of the 35 affected FBI cases can be repaired. March 4, 2027, is when Judge Giles is scheduled to take up the first of those questions.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Micah Zimmerman.