U.S. FBI intelligence agent arrested in connection with theft of $1 million in crypto

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A supervising U.S. FBI agent who worked in intelligence at the national headquarters has been arrested and accused in a federal court filing of stealing more than $1 million in cryptocurrency.

The high-level special agent, identified as Patrick Steven Yarmoch, allegedly turned himself in to agency colleagues, reporting that he dug crypto keys from FBI systems to make as many as a dozen transfers to himself from accounts tied to foreign individuals he'd investigated, according to an August 1 account filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Yarmoch — who held a "top secret" security clearance — had worked in counterintelligence, specifically with an investigative unit that focused on an unnamed "adversary nation," according to the court filing, which noted he was suspended for a couple of days before being fired and arrested on July 31.

The resident of Ashburn, Virginia, had worked as a supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters in Washington, specifically in its counterintelligence and espionage division. He'd previously worked for years out of Boston, where he'd been in a national-security unit investigating the adversary nation referenced in the court filing.

In handling the digital assets, Yarmoch was said to use accounts with Kraken and also Suilend, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem for the Sui blockchain, via a Slush wallet.

The FBI searches of his computer and phone records revealed some of his recent questions to AI apps, including, "If you had a bucket of money (around $1 million) and you wanted to leave the USA and become a resident or citizen of an EU country, what would you do?” To which the app allegedly recommended Portugal as a favored destination.

Investigators also located travel plans for Yarmoch and his family to go to Portugal next month. He was also said to take recent trips to Germany, Portugal and Grenada that he hadn't reported internally, in violation of FBI rules.

Yarmoch was placed in detention in Alexandria, Virginia.