
A stolen painting appears for sale on the dark web - nikcub
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/painting-stolen-new-zealand-sale-gottfried-lindauer-chief-ngatai-raure
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zitterbewegung
Oh, the White Shadow market wants some publicity so they take a relatively
well known painting that was stolen and they make a listing for it.

Or they do have it and they fed this article to wired regardless .

This is a great way to promote this site !

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test1235
What would the buyer do with the painting?

Is this for investment purposes, in which case, how would they sell this in
the future? Surely the legality issues would reduce the pool of potential
customers, and the overall resale value.

Or are there people who will buy such a painting for their own personal
enjoyment? (I guess just because I don't see the value, doesn't mean there
aren't people with vast amounts of disposable income who will buy things like
this on a whim.)

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gtsteve
I could imagine an astonishingly wealthy person finding they no longer get any
enjoyment from buying regular things taking delight in owning a stolen
original. Nobody else has that.

If that hypothetical person happens to live in a country where extradition to
New Zealand would be impossible, or they have appropriate connections, it
might be seen as an acceptable risk.

And perhaps in a few generations, the heirs of that wealthy person could sell
it on. I don't really know how it works if you discover you've inherited
property that was stolen a hundred years ago for example. At what point does
it become yours?

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microcolonel
> _At what point does it become yours?_

At no point does it become yours. I'm pretty sure that, while you can't
necessarily prosecute the person currently in possession, you could almost
certainly recover the property if you could prove it was stolen from your
estate.

Added: In most English speaking countries it becomes a crime to willfully
possess stolen property as soon as you know that it is stolen. In general, the
lack of mens rea in merely possessing stolen goods would make it enough to
repatriate the goods, but if that's not enough, most statutes on the matter
explicitly state that you must know and wish to unlawfully handle the stolen
property.

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LyndsySimon
I wonder if it being an international theft would impact the true owner's
ability to recover the work, even if they knew who possessed it?

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microcolonel
I think most civilized countries would recognize a theft committed in another
country as rendering the property _stolen property_ , unless they had some
important relationship with the criminal or their heirs. Some countries might
be easier to pay off, though (but as a result, also more dangerous places to
store valuable goods).

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dtien
For those wondering how and why the wealthy can acquire these types of clearly
stolen property, theres a great report with associated podcast dicing into all
the machinations and legal wranglings surrounding a piece of art that was
stolen by the nazis.

For the most part the legal maneuvers likely would have stalled out if not for
the leaking of the Panama Papers years ago which shed light on who owned which
shell companies, and how, etc.

Heres the short version of the article, theres also a more in depth podcast:
[https://www.npr.org/2016/04/12/473856459/panama-papers-
provi...](https://www.npr.org/2016/04/12/473856459/panama-papers-provide-rare-
glimpse-inside-famously-opaque-art-market)

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forapurpose
Plenty of museums contain stolen works. Consider all the artifacts from other
countries and art stolen during war. There was a film recently about a family
trying to recover art they owned, displayed openly in a museum, that was
stolen by the Nazis.

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tryingagainbro
Complicated. UK for example claims to have gotten permission from the Ottoman
Turks to take a lot of stuff from Greece. At that time, Turks were the legit
rulers, as Greece didn;t exist, so are they stolen?

Also, many time the Nazis officially or unofficially (ruling elites in city)
"bought" them from Jewish owners. We can guess the price "agreed" to in those
times.

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abcd_f
Perhaps a naive question, but say they sell it. How would they then cash this
amount of bitcoin?

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polyomino
They would have to tumble the bitcoin so that the sale is not linked to their
bitcoin. Then, they can cash it out by trading it in an exchange and
withdrawing usd to their bank, or they can trade it for cash on something like
localbitcoins.com. The Bitcoin/usd market is liquid enough to absorb this
amount of money.

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fbnlsr
I'm not very familiar with the inner parts of the system, but I thought each
and every transaction in the bitcoin ecosystem is traceable. How does one can
"unlink" bitcoin from this sale?

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IkmoIkmo
Say you have 1000 $1 bills marked with an identification number.

It's now easy to tell you're the thief as you own all the bills with all the
ID numbers that were registered as used for the sale.

You then put it in a big box together with a thousand others who all also have
$1k. You then shake and tumble the box, and then hand out $1k to each and
everyone of them.

It's now quite hard to determine who is the thief, as everyone has about 1
registered bill, but 999 unregistered bills.

Then magnify that by a lot and throw in some extras, and it gets tricky.

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icelancer
And convert your USD into EUR and then into JPY, back into USD.

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the_stc
This does very small amount to enhance your privacy. Whatever exchange you use
will track those trades. If the exchange is not tracking you then making
multiple trades will not help very much.

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glitch003
Most people use ShapeShift for this kind of thing. You don't create an account
or use any identifying information on ShapeShift.

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the_stc
shapeshift publishes all trades

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rothbardrand
I wonder if there is a reward for the return of the painting? One could buy it
and turn it in for the reward, effectively reward arbitrage. In fact, I would
expect the legit owners or insurance company to bid.

Given the painting was stolen, is it better that the insurance company can
recover it for some money (thus meaning that money was lost, which is easily
replaceable) so the painting can continue its life (possibly including public
exhibition). Money is easier to replace than a painting, paintings are
irreplaceable.

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Artnome
Proof the Dark Web Linduaer is photoshopped.

[https://www.artnome.com/news/2017/12/2/debunking-the-dark-
we...](https://www.artnome.com/news/2017/12/2/debunking-the-dark-web-sale-of-
the-stolen-lindauer-painting)

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anc84
How would the exchange of goods happen? Could I just put up something like
this up for auction, take the money and never ship (what I don't have)?

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gjjrfcbugxbhf
Similar to any criminal exchange I guess.

Presumably any potential buyer has access to the ability to make your life
very short and painful...

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SmellyGeekBoy
I didn't realise art collectors were quite so ruthless!

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usrusr
How about the very narrow subset of art collectors who might seriously
consider purchasing famously stolen art on the darknet?

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kwhitefoot
Odd use of the word 'rare'. Each painting is unique and is thus exactly as
rare as any other painting. Or does it refer to the artist's total number of
works?

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elorant
Rare in the context of art could mean one of two things. Either there are very
few existing works of an artist, or a work has disappear from the market and
no one knows where it's gone. It could be in a vault in a private collection
and no one has seen it in public for ages (which in some cases could be
centuries).

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vidarh
To complicate it, for many subjects there are multiple very similar paintings
by the same artist. Sometimes so similar they're often confused.

E.g. Edvard Munch's "The Scream" [1] exists in four different versions that
are all referred to by that name (as well as 45 litographs).

Other times simply because the artist painted the same subjects a lot.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream)

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corecoder
Are there non-rare paintings? Aren't they all unique?

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cheschire
I thought the same thing. I suppose there are painting factories though, where
people churn out all those $20 oil paintings I've seen for sale at furniture
stores. They're basically just big brush swipes and big dabs of paint making
abstract flowers. Those aren't rare.

