College librarian stole $17 million in paintings--replaced them with his own fakes.

Somehow this story flew under the radar in America.

A college librarian in China stole $17 million in paintings, 143 in total, over the course of nearly a decade, while replacing the works with his own forgeries. Xiao Yuan told a Chinese court he had a perfectly good reason for all this: Everyone was doing it.

As the New York Post reports:
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[Xiao] told the court in his defense that the practice appeared to be rampant and the handling of such paintings was not secure. He said he noticed fakes already hanging in the gallery on his first day on the job. Later, after he replaced some of the remaining masters with his own fakes, he was surprised when he noticed his fake paintings were being substituted with even more fakes.

“I realized someone else had replaced my paintings with their own because I could clearly discern that their works were terribly bad,” Xiao, 57, told Guangzhou People’s Intermediate Court.
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Pssh. If you're going to create forgeries, Xiao doesn't want you lumping his good name with bad knockoffs. He's a criminal, but not a monster!