A California man has received the maximum prison sentence for cyberstalking a Minnesota college student and a concurrent term for stealing her identity and posing as her online as a woman in pursuit of sex.
Ki Cheung Yau, 28, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in St. Paul after pleading guilty to creating accounts on various websites including social media platforms, dating websites and pornography websites using the woman's name, photos and other personally identifying information to pretend to be someone soliciting submissive or violent sexual encounters.
Yau received a five-year prison sentence on the cyberstalking count and a concurrent 4 1⁄2-year term on the identity theft count. As part of his plea agreement, he also admitted to cyberstalking seven other people elsewhere in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2021. Once out of prison, he'll be on supervised release for three years.
Electronic devices seized by law enforcement included one computer hard drive with more than "400,000 image, video and screenshot files categorized by victims' names and social media IDs," the prosecution said in a court filing shortly before sentencing.
Yau was living in Burbank, Calif., at the time he was cyberstalking the Minnesota college student he had never met. He moved to the United States in 2014 from Hong Kong and he obtained a master's in playwriting and screenwriting, according to court records. He found work in the entertainment industry as a television production assistant intern and associate staff writer, the records continued.
At sentencing on Dec. 16, Judge Wilhelmina Wright said that Yau's actions against the woman were "predatory and purely evil [and showed] a disregard for the safety and well-being of the victims and disregard for the law."
Federal sentencing guidelines recommended that Yau receive a sentence of two to 2 1⁄2 years in prison. However, in imposing the statutory maximum for cyberstalking and topping the prosecution's request for a four-year sentence, Wright told Yau, "The injuries you cause do not heal easily."
Over the course of the cyberstalking, which ran from January 2020 to November 2021, Yau tried to help strangers locate the woman and follow through on his deceptive invitations for dominating and violent sexual encounters.