FirstAlerts

Pittsford woman pleads guilty to role in stolen cooking oil scheme

Fangfang Yan admitted to concealing the theft of 90,000 pounds of used cooking oil shipped to Pennsylvania in 2022.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 22, 2026, 9:41 p.m. ET
ROCHESTER, N.Y. β€” Fangfang Yan, 41, of Shanxi, China, and Pittsford, N.Y., guilty on August 21, 2026, to misprision of a felony, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York. The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a fine of $250,000. According to the plea, on April 8 and April 28, 2022, Guodeng Chen and Didi Huang caused two shipments of 45,000 pounds each of stolen used cooking oil to be shipped from the Western District of New York to a refinery in Erie, Pennsylvania, receiving $29,433.60 and $30,618.00 respectively. Yan was aware of the illegal transport but failed to notify federal authorities, and when interviewed by law enforcement on May 6, 2022, she refused to answer questions to conceal the crimes. The plea was announced by U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Meghan K. McGuire. Sentencing is scheduled for December 1, 2026, before U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 123 Aug 2026, 01:41current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble β€” all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources β€” accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements β€” and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld β€” a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them β€” and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.