A former FBI agent has admitted to stealing nearly $1 million in seized cryptocurrency before turning to ChatGPT to plan his escape abroad. Federal court filings show the agent carried out a series of illicit digital transfers from official cases, only to confess after becoming overwhelmed by guilt. Investigators later searched his phone, discovering a trail of artificial intelligence prompts that exposed his desperate attempt to disappear.
A former senior FBI officer has confessed to taking almost $1 million in crypto from wallets linked to an official probe, before using ChatGPT to research investment strategies and plan his departure from the US, according to legal filings.
‘Very Poor Decisions’
Patrick Steven Yaroch confessed to making ‘very poor decisions related to cryptocurrency wallets’ during a conversation with a Justice Department official, according to a criminal complaint lodged in an Eastern Virginia federal court. He subsequently acknowledged breaching FBI internal databases to secure private keys, allowing him to drain funds from official digital wallets directly into his own accounts.
Court filings reveal that Yaroch leveraged his clearance over digital assets tied to active probes, quietly siphoning funds into personal accounts using credentials harvested from FBI databases. The illicit transactions began in late 2024 or early 2025, according to his own admission.
Former FBI agent Patrick Yaroch will spend another night in jail as a Magistrate Judge decides on conditions of release. The judge found probable cause in the charges. Yaroch turned himself in last week admitting to the FBI he stole a million dollars in cryptocurrency. pic.twitter.com/ufGOGPqHEi
— Paul Wagner (@paulcwagner) August 4, 2026
Driven by guilt that was ‘eating him up inside’, Yaroch reached out to a Justice Department colleague through Signal on 28 July to arrange a face-to-face meeting the next afternoon. It was during this sit-down that he came clean, owning up to steering roughly a dozen illicit crypto transfers straight into his private holdings.
AI Escape Plan Exposed
Examining Yaroch’s phone under a search warrant, federal agents uncovered a series of ChatGPT logs detailing plans to invest $1 million and relocate overseas. One specific query found in Yaroch’s search history read: ‘If I had a million dollars, how would you suggest investing it/spending it to maximize profit and return?’
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A few days down the line, Yaroch submitted a follow-up query to the chatbot: ‘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?’
Calculating the exact sum stolen proved difficult, as Yaroch admitted to pooling the illicit funds with his own money, though he placed the wallet’s total worth at roughly $1 million during a separate debriefing.
Federal prosecutors have hit Yaroch with counts of transporting and receiving stolen goods, securities, and funds across state lines, with proceedings against the former agent still underway.
