Irvine Realtor Spied on Taiwan President's Son for China, Prosecutors Say

Wanying "Heather" Zhang, 34, was arrested at LAX before a flight to Shanghai and faces up to 10 years if convicted.

FBI agents arrested Wanying "Heather" Zhang, a 34-year-old Irvine real estate agent, at LAX on Sunday before she could board a flight to Shanghai. Federal prosecutors announced the arrest at Los Angeles International Airport.

Prosecutors say that a year earlier, she filmed the son of Taiwan's president and his family outside their home near Seattle. Chinese government officials gave the order, they say. She's charged with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The federal law makes it a crime to work for another country without first notifying the U.S. attorney general, and it carries up to 10 years in prison.

The night in Seattle is laid out in a criminal complaint an FBI counterintelligence agent filed on Oct. 3, CBS News first reported. The complaint says Zhang and a man it identifies only as "Individual 1" flew into Seattle from Las Vegas on Sept. 1, 2025. They picked up a rented black Nissan Rogue and drove to the house. A neighbor's security camera caught the pair as a man, his wife and their child got home that evening, the filing says.

Then she messaged a Chinese government handler on WeChat, the complaint says: "Saw him. Young male. It's that young one." She also sent two license plate numbers. The FBI got the messages through a search warrant on her iCloud account.

The complaint doesn't name the man they filmed. Law enforcement sources told CBS the man is Ting-Yu Lai, an engineer in his 30s and the son of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. The network matched the camera images to a house near Seattle that he owns. FBI Special Agent Kevin Holt, who wrote the affidavit, spelled out why Beijing might want such pictures. In a conflict, he wrote, images of a top Taiwanese official's relatives, homes and cars "could be useful to the PRC."

Holt's affidavit traces the assignment to June 2025. That's when a classmate from Zhang's alma mater, Beijing's University of International Relations, introduced her to one of the officials, he wrote. Holt says the school has close ties to China's Ministry of State Security. That month, on a trip to Changsha, China, Zhang booked a private room and met the official there, the affidavit claims. She left with the job and later texted that she could handle it, according to the affidavit.

Back in Southern California, Zhang is a licensed real estate agent with JC Pacific Capital, CBS reported. Her Zillow profile lists 130 sales and listings across Los Angeles and nearby counties.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, the No. 2 federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, told Fox News that she's a naturalized U.S. citizen. Her husband, Edric Ding, works at the same firm. He told CBS by phone on Sunday, "I don't know anything yet."

Essayli posted video of Zhang in handcuffs walking through the airport with agents, ABC7 reported. He told Fox 11 Los Angeles the case fits a wider Chinese effort to gather intelligence on Beijing's opponents and court American politicians. Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, pleaded guilty earlier this year to working as an unregistered Chinese agent, Fox 11 reported. Her case is separate, with no known link to Zhang's.

Taiwan's presidential office thanked the U.S. government on Monday and called the alleged surveillance a "classic case of transnational repression," Time reported.

Zhang was scheduled for her first appearance in federal court in Los Angeles on Monday. CBS reported that it wasn't clear whether she has a lawyer.

Source: law.cornell.edu, retrieved October 5, 2026. Other sources: CBS News, abc7.com, foxla.com, time.com.