$216,000 Worth of Ancient Chinese Manuscripts Stolen from the UCLA Library Through an Elaborate Scam
- by Michael Stillman
Charles E. Young Research Library from which manuscripts were stolen.
A San Francisco Bay area man has been charged with theft of rare and valuable Chinese manuscripts from the UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) library. Jeffrey Ying of Fremont, a man of many aliases, combined clever planning and weaknesses in the library security procedures to walk away with an estimated $216,000 worth of historical manuscripts between December 2024 and July 2025. However, it is believed that these were not his first thefts and that he has hit other libraries before, as far back as almost five years ago.
According to the charges, Ying would order valuable manuscripts from the university in advance. That step was necessary as valuable material such as this is kept in separate storage. It is not clear from the charges whether he was allowed to remove the items from the reading room or accomplished the alleged thefts from there. What he did was to create dummy copies, “books” that looked like the originals on the outside, but with something else, at times blank pages, inside. He created special fake tags to make the copies look real. He returned the dummy copies and left with the real manuscripts. A weakness in the security system is that evidently no one examined the books before they were returned to storage.
Recently, according to the U.S. Attorney for Central California, the library noticed that some of the manuscripts were missing. They determined they were last reviewed by someone with the name “Alan Fujimori.” Further investigation revealed that “Fujimori” had been involved in earlier library thefts. He had used the same procedure and alias at U.C. Berkeley.
Further investigation, including security camera footage, revealed the same man had previously taken out books from UCLA using the name “Jason Wang.” They were also able to connect Ying to another alias, “Austin Chen.”
“Austin Chen” recently reserved eight more rare Chinese books from the UCLA library. Officials were now on the lookout. When Ying, alias “Chen,” arrived to pick up the books, he was arrested by UCLA police. He was taken into custody and denied bail as a flight risk. That was an obvious danger as records showed that Ying had taken flights to Hong Kong and Shanghai after pulling off previous alleged thefts. It is presumed that he either sold the manuscripts or made other provisions for them when he went to China.
When officers examined Ying, they found a fake California ID on him in the name of Austin Chen and two library cards with the names “Austin Chen” and “Jason Wang.” They also found a keycard for a hotel room three miles from UCLA. When they searched his hotel room, they discovered blank paper and manuscripts in the style used for the fake manuscripts along with pre-made labels known as asset tags that could be placed on the dummy copies when they were substituted for the real ones.
