Fake ancient statues worth £680,000 exposed after UK fraudster slipped up on paperwork

A man from Gloucestershire tried to pass off counterfeit ancient statues as genuine artefacts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds at one of the world's most famous auction houses.

His plan unravelled not because experts doubted the objects themselves but because the paperwork he submitted gave him away entirely.Andrew Crowley, 46, from Longwell Green, approached Sotheby's to value three Cycladic figures and one Anatolian stargazer statuette. He said he had inherited them from his grandfather. If genuine, the four pieces would have fetched around £680,000 based on previous comparable sales.

The judge at Southwark Crown Court later revised that figure to £340,000 given the number of uncertainties involved.To support his case, Crowley presented invoices that looked the part on the surface. The documents appeared to date from 1976 and were typed on paper bearing an antique dealer's logo along with a nine-pence stamp. The Guardian reported that forensic scientists found the printing methods used in those documents were not invented until 2001.

On top of that, Sotheby's own experts noticed spelling errors including a mistake in the supplier's name.Judge Rimmer told Southwark Crown Court it was a crude attempt and that Sotheby's spotted the documents as bogus fairly early on. The court accepted that Crowley genuinely believed the statues were real and had no idea they were counterfeits. Legitimate Cycladic pieces date back roughly 3,000 years to the Bronze Age and originate from the Greek islands of the Cyclades.

Each of the statues in this case stood around 30cm tall and weighed about 1kg.Crowley had previously admitted to dishonestly making a false representation to Sotheby's between November 2022 and July 2023. He received a two-year suspended sentence along with 200 hours of unpaid work and was ordered to pay £1,630 in costs.