On June 4, 2026, at 8:35 in the morning, FBI Supervisory Special Agent Patrick Steven Yaroch typed a question into ChatGPT: "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?"
He wasn't writing a novel. He'd already stolen $925,426.07 in cryptocurrency.
Yaroch, 37, a nine-year veteran of the FBI, was arrested on Friday and charged with interstate transportation of stolen goods and receipt of stolen goods. A search warrant authorized by United States Magistrate Judge William B. Porter on July 30 revealed a trail of ChatGPT conversations that read less like a criminal mastermind and more like a guy Googling "how to be a fugitive" in real time.
The ChatGPT logs are something. On May 28, Yaroch asked the AI how to invest a million dollars to "maximize profit and return." By June 4, he'd moved on to planning his exit from the country. On June 17, he was asking whether Americans need a visa to connect through Turkey. By June 26 — barely a month after the theft — he was drafting a job application email for a position in Greece.
The man allegedly transferred the cryptocurrency in up to a dozen separate transactions. His retirement goal, according to investigators, was age 40. He was three years ahead of schedule, just not in the way he'd planned.
Yaroch eventually walked into FBI Headquarters voluntarily, told a DOJ employee he'd "made some very poor decisions related to cryptocurrency," and said the whole thing was "eating him up inside." He said he'd "screwed up" and wanted to "get it off his chest." Which is one way to describe stealing nearly a million dollars from what investigators described as a source connected to an adversarial nation — Russia.
The FBI released a statement saying it "immediately took action" and that "the individual has since been fired from the Bureau. We hold our employees to the highest ethical standards, and this conduct is not tolerated at the FBI."
Retired FBI agent Linda Rarey offered a blunter assessment: "This was not an 'oops' thing. This was a deliberate thing, IMHO."
She's right. There's nothing accidental about a dozen crypto transfers followed by a two-week ChatGPT tutorial on how to disappear into the European countryside. Yaroch was researching vineyards in Portugal's Dão region. He wanted a 2-to-5-hectare estate. A family trip to Portugal was already booked for September.
The AI angle makes it worse, not because ChatGPT did anything illegal — it answered generic financial questions — but because it shows the caliber of planning involved. This wasn't sophisticated. It was a federal agent with top-secret clearance typing his escape plan into a consumer product that logs everything.
We spend a lot of time debating whether AI will be used by criminals to do dangerous things. Turns out the first notable case is an FBI agent who couldn't even clear his browser history.