A Bay Area man is accused of stealing a rare, $216,000 Chinese manuscript from the UCLA library in a suspected scheme that includes fake aliases and exchange books.
Jeffrey Ying of Fremont is said to have checked out UCLA’s valuable antique manuscript in five years of robbery using three fake names.
Ying, who was arrested Wednesday before attempting to flee to China, was charged with a felony that can be punished by a US law firm in federal prison for up to 10 years, and appears in U.S. District Court, the US Law Office in Los Angeles said Thursday.
According to the FBI affidavit, Ying, 38, rented manuscripts in the group and recently abused the new system at UCLA, allowing users to request library cards and rentals without displaying their official ID. He then returns a “dummy book” in place of the actual manuscript.
“Dummy books” were often blank or low value manuscripts with computer-paper-printed labels and asset tags to mimic real books.
Since 2020, Ying has allegedly requested books from the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRL), a remote UCLA library storage space to accommodate rare or delicate books. Upon his request, the box containing the manuscript will be transported to a reserved reading room at UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library. According to the FBI affidavit, Ying reviewed and replaced the manuscript with his “dummy” and took the original with him when he left.
Library staff told The Times the official policy is to ensure that attendants are always present in the reading room when someone reads a book in a special collection.
When the materials were returned to the library, the university had no policies requiring thorough review of the items to prevent them from being replaced with dummy manuscripts, officials said.
The director of the UCLA Library’s Special Collections has been notified by the university’s East Asian Library Director that he went missing after being last checked out by someone named “Alan Fujimori.”
According to the FBI affidavit, security camera analysis from library staff revealed that Fujiwara, Austin Chen and Jason Wang had been checking out valuable manuscripts over the years, all aliases.
Through an investigation of travel records, FBI officials said they discovered that Ying had traveled back and forth between China within days of alleged robbery, presumably to sell or transport the book.
However, the FBI said it has not yet confirmed whether Ying sold or traded any of the manuscripts. The FBI affidavit also cites all books stolen by Ying as “never come back.”
The official number of stolen books is unconfirmed, but testimony in the affidavit suggests that at least 10 are missing, each one between $274 and $70,000.
A federal investigation detailed in the FBI affidavit between October and December last year found that Ying had checked out six books under the alias “Jason Wang.” On August 5th this year, Ying requested eight more books as “Austin Chen.” The next day, Ying was planning on board a previously booked flight to China. UCLA police had already been turned over from suspicious behavior – by the time they arrived to pick up eight books before his flight, authorities were called and quickly arrested him.
Although the arrest and affidavit records focused primarily on robbery over the past year, in 2020, Ying claims that he stole two UCLA manuscripts from the 13th and 16th centuries under the name Alan Fujimori.
His record can be further back. The FBI affidavit states that the alias “Alan Fujimori” is associated with a known book burglar who was running after a similar theft at the UC Berkeley Library.
In his arrest, Ying was found on a card at Hotel Angeleno, three miles from the UCLA library, according to an investigation detailed in an affidavit of the FBI and UCLA police. The document also detailed that later on the day of the arrest, officers and detectives searched Ying’s room with a search warrant. They found blank manuscripts, printed tags, and fraudulent IDs that match past aliases.
Ying is not yet in line with his lawyer and is being detained for the risk of leaving the country.
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