Art Fraud: Raiders of the Lost Past Available to Purchase

The clandestine excavation of antiquities for profit is not a new enterprise: papyrus texts show it to have been a pressing problem in Ancient Egypt. But the scale of the traffic in looted antiquities is now said to be second only to that of drug smuggling in terms of annual turnover, and there is evidence that the traffic in antiquities and the traffic in drugs now often go hand in hand — especially when the antiquities in question derive from drug‐producing countries in South‐East Asia and in South America. Moreover, antiquities are at present relatively easy to market — they are highly fungible assets, and hence very suitable as a medium for money laundering.