Con man v Con man
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Police Arrest Brothers Who Sold a Fake Goya … and Were Paid with Fake Cash"
Spanish Police have arrested two brothers from Girona, Spain, who attempted to sell a fake Francisco de Goya painting to a purported sheikh, EFE reports. But the "sheikh" was no victim: he paid the pair with photocopied money.
The con artists realized they had been tricked when they tried to deposit 1.7 million Swiss francs (€1.5 million) in a Geneva bank and were told that the banknotes were mere photocopies.
Spanish police officers found out about the scam in December 2014, when the Avignon customs warned them that they had intercepted two Spanish brothers trying to smuggle 1.7 million fake Swiss francs.
The sheikh had purportedly agreed to pay a total of €4 million for the Goya painting, entitled Portrait of don Antonio María Esquivel. The first batch of cash was to be collected in Turin, and was delivered by a middleman from the prince's entourage. Apparently, the brothers verified the cash was legit with a machine, but the middleman managed to switch it before they left for Switzerland.
To add insult to injury, the brothers had also given a €300,000 premium to the middleman who had introduced them to the sheikh. In order to do so, they had asked a friend to lend them the money, promising to give it back the following day, with an extra €80,000.
But things did not pan out as expected. The sheikh and the middleman, carrying the €300,000, have gone underground and their whereabouts are currently unknown. Meanwhile, the fake Goya painting—which was found in one of the brothers' houses upon their arrest—is currently being held by police. (believe it or no there is more to this story)
4 comments:
The guy who loaned the real up front money lost out, but if not for that then nothing real was lost or even at risk. No rare painting was involved, and no real money. So, isn't this essentially a victim-less crime, or no crime at all?
Back in the late 60s or early 70s, I had a friend named Lalo who bought a bunch of reef, and paid for it in counterfeit money. They tried to spend the counterfeit money, got busted and went to prison. It's a dog eat dog world out there.
I would've liked to be a fly on the wall when the middleman managed the switch. Wow, talk about high anxiety.
There was an artist active during the eighties who used to draw counterfeit pound notes. They were realistic in every detail except he substituted Minnie Mouse or some such creature for the Queen's portrait. He was a well known artist and these fake pound notes were worth a good deal more than the real notes. He was arrested for counterfeiting, and that was his defense. If the counterfeit article was worth more than the real thing, then it was not a counterfeit. As I recall, he got off..........Goya was a phony. Some of the drawings that he labelled "This I Saw", he never actually witnessed. The counterfeiter should have painted pictures of Goya's false memories and used a similar defense before the courts.
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