Patrick Steven Yaroch was arrested July 31 at his home in Ashburn, Virginia, and charged the same day by criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia with interstate transportation of stolen goods, securities and monies, and receipt of stolen goods, securities and monies, Washington Examiner reported. The FBI fired him that day.
The affidavit does not name the country whose accounts were drained, describing it only as adversarial. Two people familiar with the matter told NBC News it was Russia.
Bitcoin.com reported that the nation and the target's identity both remain sealed in the court record.
Yaroch had been with the bureau since 2017 and held a Top Secret clearance as a supervisory special agent in the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. He spent years on national security work in the Boston Division before moving to headquarters in Washington in early 2025, CoinDesk reported.
According to the affidavit, he grew dissatisfied that the FBI was unwilling or unable to disrupt the adversarial nation's use of cryptocurrency and resolved to "take matters into his own hands," the Washington Examiner reported.
