Art Market
Josie Thaddeus-Johns
In January 2020, the museum Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, the Netherlands, was on the verge of purchasing an 1824 John Constable painting from London dealer Simon Dickinson. In the middle of the negotiations, however, something went wrong: Hackers managed to convince the museum to send the money to a different bank account.
Dickinson is hardly the only gallery in the art world hit by this type of fraud. In 2017, Laura Bartlett Gallery was forced to close following the financial impact of a similar scheme. And earlier this year, Italian gallery T293 was targeted by hackers, who duped a German collector into sending over $30,000 into their bank account instead of the gallery’s. What is it about the art world that makes it such a target?
In fact, this kind of scam is pervasive across industries, said Fionnuala Rogers of Canvas Art Law: Criminals target what they see as vulnerabilities. “They always target smaller businesses, just because they know that the systems in place are going to be fairly basic,” Rogers said. And yet the huge sums of money at play, and the low-security channels used to transact them, make the art world particularly attractive as a target.
“You’ve got high values, and so much is done on an informal basis: emails and WhatsApp exchanges,” Rogers added. This opens the door to a variety of scams, some of which are extremely hard to detect. She noted that galleries and collectors typically exchange invoices as…
