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A prolific book thief has been jailed for 25 months after he stole more than 7,000 books from three universities in Edinburgh, before selling them online.
Darren Barr, 28, from Kinross in Perthshire, is believed to have made more than £30,000 by selling the textbooks through the online book markets WeBuyBooks, Ziffit and Zapper.
During an 11-month crime spree from October 2017, Barr is believed to have stolen thousands of textbooks from Napier University and hundreds more from Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt universities.
None were rare but Napier said they included sought-after texts on nursing, business studies, human resources, criminology and marketing.
Barr’s thefts came to light after a PhD student at Napier tried to borrow a textbook from the university library but found none were available. She bought that book and another on Amazon from WeBuyBooks and discovered both had originated from Napier’s library.
Although the books had a fake “withdrawn” red stamp on the inside covers, the university’s system showed they were both still recorded as in the library. Napier carried out a full audit and discovered that between 4,000 and 4,250 of its books were missing with a face value of £72,800.
WeBuyBooks checked its records and confirmed it had bought hundreds of books from the same individual with the same bank account. It emerged WeBuyBooks had paid Barr £10,612 for 1,995 books; Ziffit paid £18,600 for 4,488 books and Zapper £1,238 for 253 texts.
Barr pleaded guilty to four charges of theft earlier this year and now faces an assets seizure under proceeds of crime legislation normally used for drugs gangs and fraudsters.
Passing sentence on Wednesday at Edinburgh sheriff court, Sheriff Kenneth McGowan said: “What I have before me here is a course of conduct continuing over a lengthy period of 11 months during which a very substantial number of books were stolen from Napier University in particular. These were of a high value. There was clearly careful planning on your part.”
Police Scotland said they recovered 1,300 of the stolen books from around the UK, including 260 from Edinburgh university and Heriot-Watt.
DS Dougal Begg, from Corstorphine CID, said: “This is one of the most brazen and high-value thefts from our universities that I can ever recall. The amount of money Darren Barr was able to make by resetting stolen books is staggering.
“Had it not been for the staff at Napier University raising their concerns about missing stock, we may never have uncovered what Barr was up to and even larger quantities of books may have ended up being taken from the institutions.”
The court heard that CCTV footage from Napier showed Barr arriving at the library with a rucksack and holdall, before driving away. He had applied for an external reader’s ticket, and detectives then found he had used the same technique at Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt, acquiring visitor readers’ tickets at both. The 230 books stolen from Edinburgh were worth about £9,200.
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