FBI agent accused of stealing $1 million in crypto — and he even consulted ChatGPT on how to leave the country
Asking an AI agent that retains all its conversations how to reinvest your criminal proceeds might not be the best play
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/rahim-amir · TechRadarNews By Rahim Amir Published 5 August 2026
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- A former FBI counterintelligence supervisor is accused of memorizing seed phrases from bureau systems
- The agent moved roughly $1 million out of wallets tied to a foreign adversary without having to resort to any sort of hacking
- Investigators recovered ChatGPT conversations in which he asked how to invest the money and how to gain EU residency, and the chatbot's replies recited his age, wife, child, and property plans back to him
Patrick Steven Yaroch, a supervisory special agent in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, has been arrested and charged with interstate transportation and receipt of stolen goods.
An affidavit filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, claims Yaroch took roughly a million dollars in cryptocurrency from wallets he encountered while investigating a foreign adversary and then used ChatGPT to determine what to do with it.
The theft, as described, required no technical sophistication whatsoever: Yaroch held a Top Secret clearance with SCI access and had spent 2017 to 2025 on a national security squad at the FBI's Boston division working against a single adversarial nation, which NBC News reports was Russia.
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An atypical heist with the alleged mastermind acting out of "frustration"
Patrick Steven Yaroch encountered the cryptocurrency wallets tied to his work in November 2024. He had researched how wallets work, created one of his own, searched the FBI's holdings for the relevant account information, and memorized the recovery seed phrases.
He then made roughly 10-12 transfers to his own wallet. No encryption was broken, and no protocol was exploited because none was in place for a man with his security clearance; he simply read a phrase off an internal system and remembered it.
The incident is particularly interesting because he self-reported, effectively turning himself in to his colleagues: on July 28 2026, he contacted a Justice Department employee he had worked with in Boston over Signal, asking to meet. They met at FBI headquarters the next day, where Yaroch reportedly began breaking down almost immediately, and the conversation moved to the other man's office.
He said the situation was "eating him up inside" and that he wanted to give all the money back. He filed an online self-report to the FBI's Security Division and told headquarters personnel he had screwed up. When agents arrived at his Ashburn home that evening, he told them, unprompted and in blunter terms, that he had messed up.
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