Fake IDs, dummy books. How rare UCLA library manuscripts were stolen

Last year, staffers at the University of California, Los Angeles' East Asian Library were going through a box of viewed books from the school's special collections when they noticed something was amiss.

The box included rare and timeworn Chinese texts, some worth thousands of dollars – but closer inspection revealed the bound manuscripts were not what they seemed. Instead, they were counterfeits, affixed with fake identification tags; printed characters spilled down their unweathered pages rather than hand-scrawled ones.

They checked the records to see who'd last requested to see the books. The name: Alan Fujimori, a name they'd been tipped off to after similar incidents at other university libraries. UCLA's growing probe found that Fujimori and others had borrowed other Chinese texts since 2020 worth more than $200,000 – some of them centuries old – and also returned fake copies in their place.

The investigation ultimately led to the August 2025 arrest of one man – Northern California resident Jeffrey Ying, 39 – and the unveiling of an elaborate ruse involving fakery and multiple back-to-back flights to Asia, where federal authorities said the stolen items were sold.

"This one's interesting," FBI Special Agent Allen Grove, part of the bureau's 20-member national Art Crime Team, told USA TODAY. "In some instances, he was able to check out books, saying he was a researcher, then he would return with dummy books. In other cases, he would sneak in the dummy books and perform the swap on scene."

Ying, a resident of Fremont, California, often traveled to and from China within several days of the thefts, Grove wrote in an affidavit submitted as part of the government's federal complaint.

Among the books found missing from UCLA's collections were classic compendiums of Chinese cultural heritage. They included:

• "Tangshi pinhui," a 14th-century compilation of Chinese poetry from the culturally significant Tang Era (618-907), valued at about $70,000.
• "Yuzhi Guwen Yuanjian," a massive multivolume anthology of ancient Chinese prose commissioned by Qing Dynasty's Kangxi Emperor in 1685 and worth nearly $17,000.
• "She Yuan Mo Cui (Vols. 9-14)," a $42,000 manuscript published in 1929 as part of a highly sought-after collection of Chinese ink rubbings and woodblock prints compiled by bibliophile Tao Xiang during the post-imperial Chinese Republican period.

"The materials stolen by Mr. Ying were rare and unique books, more akin to cultural heritage objects," read an impact statement submitted to the court by Athena Jackson, who directs the UCLA library system. "The loss of access to these materials and the difficulty in replacing them affected our ability to provide resources that scholars from around the world engage with to further our understanding of China and its history and culture."

Ying exploited what until then had been vulnerable security practices related to the loaning and return of items from the school's special collections, according to authorities. For the university, Jackson wrote, the loss was more than monetary, piercing the confidence the public places in public libraries.

UCLA, she said, had already gotten comments from the world expressing doubts "about our security and stewardship" of rare items, with such concerns especially high in China and among Chinese diaspora communities.

"The theft eroded the trust that scholars, booksellers, and communities place in us to safeguard and steward rare and unique materials," Jackson wrote.

A history of library heists

Several prestigious university libraries feature rare book collections made available to researchers for scholarly purposes. While some have suffered thievery before, they've typically been targeted by institutional or industry insiders.

In 2017, administrators at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh were heartbroken to learn that hundreds of rare books, art prints and maps worth more than $8 million had been purloined from its rare books room. Greg Priore, the room's former manager, and bookseller John Schulman pleaded guilty several years later in a resale scheme that investigators found had transpired over two decades.

In 2006, map dealer E. Forbes Smiley III was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison and ordered to pay almost $2 million in restitution after admitting to stealing and selling 97 rare maps taken from prestigious libraries around the world. He was caught when a staffer at Yale University's Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut, spotted a hobby knife blade on the floor and became suspicious.

In 1987, former Library of Congress curator James W. Gilreath pleaded guilty to swiping $25,000 in rare books from the institution. The 22 books, by authors such as Walt Whitman, Jack London, and Henry David Thoreau, were all recovered.

At a time when security measures were more relaxed, hard-up antique print dealer Robert Kindred spent the summer of 1980 pillaging rare books and antique illustrations from academic libraries nationwide. Kindred, whose crimes were detailed in the book "Torn from Their Bindings: A Story of Art, Science and the Pillaging of American University Libraries," was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

"Unfortunately, these things happen more frequently than most people know," said David Stork, an adjunct professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University near Palo Alto, California. "They're often discovered only when the next person interested in this rare manuscript looks at it, years later."

At UCLA, a ruse unravels

The missing books at UCLA's East Asian Library were so unique they weren't in general circulation, meaning anyone wanting to see them had to submit a request, Grove wrote in his affidavit.

Once pulled from secured storage, such books would be presented to the requester in a tagged box for in-house viewing at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library, then returned to storage after review.

In this case, as staff eventually discovered, the box had been returned – but the books themselves had been replaced with fakes.

Grove, one of two FBI art crime team members based in Los Angeles, said UCLA staff had learned the name Alan Fujimori was linked to "a known book thief" responsible for similar thefts at the University of California, Berkeley. The university's probe, he wrote, showed that in February 2020, a person by that name failed to return to UCLA two borrowed 14th-century and 16th-century Chinese texts worth a combined $132,700.

From October to December 2024, someone named Jason Wang requested six rare Chinese books from UCLA, including "She Yuan Mo Cui." Librarians found those books hadn't really been returned, but instead had been replaced by dummy copies with fake ID tags.

As with the East Asian Library manuscripts, these books weren't in regular circulation. But they could be reserved and checked out from UCLA, even after being transferred from other UC campuses in Southern California, Grove wrote.

But until "a very recent change" in library policy, he said, anyone could borrow such materials from the school by simply applying for a library card online, "which did not require showing a government-issued identification or even a photograph."

Additionally, Grove wrote, books could be returned via a drop box or directly to a person. At the time, however, the policy did not include "a thorough review of the item being returned."

A theft scheme enters borrowed time

As the library's probe developed, officials began to believe Alan Fujimori and Jason Wang were one individual, Grove wrote in his affidavit. They gathered security camera footage linked to each visit and shared it with staff, who identified them as the same person.

In the weeks that followed, five dozen full-time and student personnel at three UCLA libraries were trained to keep an eye out for the suspect and alert university police should they spot him.

Then, Grove said, on Aug. 5, 2025, a person named Austin Chen submitted a request to borrow eight rare Chinese volumes from UCLA. Later that day, after Ying entered the library and awaited his quarry, he was arrested without incident by university police.

Ying was found to have a fake California ID with the name of Austin Chen and two library cards under the names of Chen and Jason Wang, the affidavit said. Additionally, officers found a room keycard for the nearby Hotel Angeleno.

Police executed a search warrant at Ying's room and found blank manuscript books mimicking the ones he'd requested. They also found the books' names printed on paper resembling the labels on the dummy books previously returned.

Grove checked Ying's travel records and found he'd flown into Los Angeles from Hong Kong earlier that day and planned to fly to China the following afternoon. Other travel likewise coincided with previous thefts from UCLA libraries, with flights soon after to Seoul and Shanghai.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Williams of the Central District of California, who prosecuted the case, said the items were eventually sold abroad, but he declined to provide more details.

Demand for high-value Chinese antiquities is on the rise, archaeologist Gino Caspari of the University of Bern in Switzerland told USA TODAY via email.

"Domestic Chinese interest in antiquities has surged," said Caspari, whose 2025 documentary "Among Thieves" detailed his undercover investigation into the illegal black market for such goods. "Items are prized not only for their material value but because they embody prestige, national heritage, extreme rarity and cultural capital."

Hong Kong is a major hub for illicit trade, according to Caspari. Porous borders, legal loopholes and limited law enforcement open the door for looted items to obtain new and legal paper trails that help boost their resale value, he said.

Because some items' illegality and rarity make them too risky for the open market, they circulate discreetly among elite collectors rather than through ordinary shop sales, Caspari said. Highly prized antiquities are also sought for fraud schemes in which they're donated to museums for valuable tax write-offs, he said.

Guangchen Chen, an assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Emory University in Atlanta, said more bibliophiles and private collectors in China can now afford items that official institutions won't touch. He expressed surprise that UCLA library staff didn't check the rare manuscripts as soon as they were returned, considering their value.

"Maybe they're used to all their visitors being serious scholars, and Jeffrey Ying exploited that assumption," he said.

Libraries 'don't want to be fortresses'

Neither Jackson, UCLA, nor UC Berkeley responded to requests for comment. Attempts to reach Ying through his attorney were unsuccessful.

Ying's brother, Richard Ying of Brooklyn in New York City, called the case "very interesting," but said he wouldn't speak further without the family lawyer's blessing.

Last week, Jeffrey Ying, who faced up to 10 years in federal prison, was sentenced on one count of major artwork theft to time served – just under a year – and a year of home confinement plus three years of supervised release. A restitution hearing is set for early August.

Williams said UCLA is seeking just over $200,000. He added that prosecutors had sought a longer sentence for Ying but respected the court's decision.

Stork, whose teachings at Stanford include a section on art forgery and theft, said judges may sometimes be reluctant to issue harsher sentences when it comes to stolen cultural items, seeing such crimes as nonviolent and marginally consequential.

"They don't quite appreciate the cultural significance," said Stork, author of "Pixels & Paintings: Foundations of Computer-Assisted Connoisseurship." "They have guidelines on cash value, but anyone who works in art knows that cash value and cultural significance are not always aligned."

Museums and libraries holding valuable materials walk a fine line, Stork said, seeking a balance between maintaining effective security and making the works available for public enrichment.

"They don't want to be fortresses," he said.

That compromise underscores the Association of College & Research Libraries' guidelines governing security of special collections materials.

"Research and access are at the heart of cultural heritage work," the guidelines' security section reads. "Administrators must carefully balance the responsibility of making materials available to researchers with the responsibility of ensuring the preservation and long-term availability of materials."

Photo identification is one measure the association suggests, though it acknowledges that requiring government-issued IDs can present "barriers to access for many underserved researcher populations." The association also suggests limits on, and inspection of, personal materials brought into reading rooms.

Grove told USA TODAY that in his experience as an art crime agent, unique and rare items that are stolen have "a decent recovery rate" thanks to the bureau's national stolen art database. But those recoveries don't happen right away.

"It's often years or decades later that we'll get a call saying an item is up for auction," he said. "My hope is always that they will be recovered. But they often take time."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fake IDs, dummy books. How rare UCLA library manuscripts were stolen

Reporting by Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published July 16, 2026 at 8:06 PM.