In the world of stringent control over artworks’ provenance and ethical acquisition, there is still room for art forgery. Criminals create fake works of art and manage to sell them at record-hitting prices to unsuspecting customers. This is what a supra-European art forgery network spanning Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain has been doing for years.

The network united many people across the EU, who forged works by top-famous artists of the 19th-21st centuries. Their portfolio of fakes includes ‘art pieces’ by Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, and Banksy, among others. The network’s recent exposure has allowed the Italian police to arrest its key members and advance the investigations against 38 more suspects.

Activities of the European Art Forgery Network

The large-scale forgery scheme of creating and selling artworks across Europe was first identified in 2023 with the identification of over 200 fake paintings, some of which were discovered in the collection of an Italian businessman. The collector didn’t suspect forgery of his Amedeo Modigliani masterpiece and initiated an investigation of the artworks’ provenance, which led the police to a web of auction houses that were suspected of helping criminals supply fake paintings to the art market. Three more van Gogh fakes were identified in the private collections across Europe around that time.

The criminals even arranged two Banksy exhibitions in the galleries located near Venice and Tuscany to establish themselves as credible figures in the Italian art landscape. According to the results of the joint investigation by the paramilitary Carabinieri art squad and the Pisa prosecutor’s office, the criminal group also handled the illegal sale of stolen artworks apart from creating and selling fakes.

Exposure of the Network by the Italian Police

The chief prosecutor of Pisa, Teresa Angela Camelio, headed the arrest of the art forgery network members in Italy. She characterized the operation as the biggest act of Banksy artwork protection conducted to date, with so many recent abuses of art ownership and provenance registered across the globe. The number of forged items seized at the network’s conspiracy residences exceeded 2,100, with an estimated unrealized market value of $215+ million. The police also uncovered six forgery workshops where the network’s accomplices produced believable fakes for their further sale, including those in Venice and Tuscany.