Two of three men accused of defrauding people in Denver’s Chinese immigrant community have pleaded guilty to felony theft charges, but one remains on the run.
The plot involved three Chinese men pretending to be day laborers who approached Chinese ex-pats living in the Denver area asking for help with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold they uncovered at a fictitious construction site.
They offered to sell the fake ancient gold to their marks for a fraction of its purported value because they claimed they must head back to China.
Denver businesswoman Judy Jia Gallenstein helped foil the fraud but not before some victims paid them tens of thousands of dollars.
Fuyan Li, 42, has never appeared for a court hearing, and there is a warrant out for his arrest.
The other two — Yanwen Yang, 46, and Dejin Xu, 45 — pleaded guilty Sept. 8 to theft of more than $20,000. A judge sentenced them to three years probation and ordered them to pay more than $80,000 in restitution to their victims.
As of Sept. 22, Yang and Xu were listed as “fugitives from justice” based on unrelated charges out of California and taken into custody. Jessica Fender, The Denver Post
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, the status of Yang and Xu was misrepresented. They were listed as fugitives from justice for crimes in California, and have been taken into custody for those charges.
