An art thief used several aliases to acquire UCLA library cards that allowed him to check out and steal historic manuscripts from China.

If you fail to return a library book, there is a fine; however, if you return a fake book and the librarians never check, you may be able to skip the penalties and keep the book. Sadly, it did not work out for Jeffrey Ying, of Fremont, California, who swapped out three precious manuscripts from UCLA’s Young Research Library, as the librarians caught on as he attempted a fourth steal.

According to the affidavit by an FBI agent, Ying would use multiple aliases to obtain library cards and check out the rare manuscripts from the UCLA Young Research Library. He replaced the manuscripts with “dummy books” that he returned in the boxes the library uses for the manuscripts.

Ying presumably took the manuscripts overseas, according to his travel history, which shows that he flew to California from Hong Kong, Shanghai or Seoul and back around the time of each of the thefts over the past 13 months.

The UCLA police first alerted the FBI when three rare books from the university’s East Asian Library, two of which were valued at $70,000 and $63,000, respectively, were missing from storage after they had been reviewed by a man calling himself Alan Fujimori. The books need to be reserved in advance because they are kept in secured storage.

Courthouse News Service

Previously:
• How Stéphane Breitwieser stole over a billion dollars worth of art, and the sad desperate destruction that ensued
• The juice bottle that brought down an art thief

The thief behind the massive Coinbase exploit earlier this month has begun swapping their stolen crypto.

On Wednesday, pseudonymous on-chain investigator ZachXBT noted on Telegram that the exploiter had swapped $42.5+ million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) into Ethereum (ETH) via the decentralized liquidity protocol THORChain (RUNE).

ZachXBT also notes that the thief trolled him with an on-chain message that said “L bozo” and linked to a YouTube video of former NBA star James Worthy smoking a cigar.

The exploiter later swapped 8,697 ETH for 22 million of the stablecoin Dai (DAI), according to the blockchain security firm PeckShield.

PeckShield also notes that a different address that is “highly relevant to the threat actor” received 9,081 ETH from THORChain, then swapped that ETH for 23 million DAI.

That relevant address later received another 8,569 ETH (worth approximately $22.4 million) from THORChain.

Coinbase says criminals bribed a small group of overseas customer support agents to copy the data of less than 1% of the firm’s monthly transacting users. A recent filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office indicates the breach impacted 69,461 people.

The exchange notes that hacked information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, masked social security numbers (the last 4 digits only), masked bank-account numbers, some bank account identifiers, government-ID images, account data and limited corporate data.

Coinbase learned about the hack after receiving an email earlier this month demanding a $20 million BTC payoff in exchange for not releasing the illegally obtained info. The company refused to give in to the hackers’ demand and estimates it will pay $180 million to $400 million in remediation costs and voluntary customer reimbursements.

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