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A stolen painting appears for sale on the dark web
- corecoder 9y agoAre there non-rare paintings? Aren't they all unique?
- cheschire 9y agoI 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.
- pvaldes 9y agoThere are lots of non unique paintings. Artists often explore the same theme in steps and create several versions of the same picture. There are four paintings of "The scream" by Munch for example. Some kind of art is created to be duplicated. Videoart and computer art, by design. Painters living much before computer age still managed to create thousands of "identical" copies of their pictures as a standard procedure. Auctions are full of lithographs, sometimes painted decades after the death of the artist.
- abcd_f 9y agoPerhaps a naive question, but say they sell it. How would they then cash this amount of bitcoin?
- polyomino 9y agoThey 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.
- herbst 9y agoYou are assuming that the person bought it with traceable fiat money. I never bought Bitcoin not in cash and person and mainly I earned them myself, also never linkable to my identity
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoNever linkable? Are you sure, if you earned them they must have come from somewhere?
- celticninja 9y agoIt is pseudonymous, so if you did work for someone over the internet and never met them, they could pay you without ever knowing your name and address. If your adversaries were looking to trace the coins they would see a transfer between 2 addresses only. If they managed to track down the owner of the sending address then that person could say they paid you for work done and pass on whatever contact details they have. So unlinking can be done and this is based on the adversary knowing which transaction and who the sender was.
- ryan-c 9y agoMining them using the eligius mining pool (which doesn't require registration, just a bitcoin address) over Tor would be pretty hard to link to an identity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fbnlsr 9y agoI'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?
- noddy1 9y agoA few options - in practice you would probably do some/all of these: 1) Put them through a mixer 2) Put them through an anonymous exchanger like shapeshift and convert into a privacy focused cryptocurrency like monero/zcash 3) Sell on offshore/low-regulation exchange, or via an anonymous credit card service
- martinko 9y ago30btc is a trivial amount
- kwhitefoot 9y agoOdd 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?
- King-Aaron 9y agoIt would likely be referring to a painting that not many people would have seen publicly. You're right, the Mona Lisa is a "rare" painting by definition, as there is only one of it amongst however many works of art exist. But because it's well known and seen publicly a lot, you wouldn't call it 'rare'. Though by my own definition, it means the scribbles on the side of my notepad are equally (if not more) rare. So disregard my comment as 5.30pm without enough caffeine nonsense.
- Retric 9y agoYou could describe Mona Lisa as rare based on age. ~99% of existing paintings are probably younger, and ~99% of paintings painted in the same year are likely heavily degraded if not destroyed. Or even just having a vastly higher value than most things. After all few objects are worth significantly more than 100,000,000$. Or even just "A Rare example of a great masters work." which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- a_humean 9y agoIf you are being unkind, then yes he is making what seems to be a type of category error. Dummett or Frege might decribe it as using a second order predicate as a first order predicate. Entirely grammatical, but nonsensical. He probably just means valuable or unique(as a kind of painting whether by authorship or other kind). Title in a previous version might have been "Rare Gottfried Lindauer painting is stolen...", but was shortened.
- jmkni 9y agoRare might not refer to the painting itself. For example, if an artist had most of their work destroyed, any remaining paintings would be a rare painting by that artist. Or if a historically significant figure had only been painted by a small number of people, any painting of that person could be described as rare. It's probably fake anyway!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anc84 9y agoHow 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)?
- andrewchambers 9y agoYou wouldn't be able to make another sale in the future. For a one time thing, absolutely though.
- taneq 9y agoOn the plus side, you wouldn't need to actually have the painting in your possession to pull this off...
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoSimilar to any criminal exchange I guess. Presumably any potential buyer has access to the ability to make your life very short and painful...
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoOnly if they can find you. The whole point of darknet markets is that it's difficult for even major governments to track down users. As far as I can tell, the only thing potentially binding darknet sellers is reputation, i.e. they want to be able to make further sales under this name. Even then, people run scams on eBay where they build up a sterling record selling small items for months, then "sell" something worth six figures and vanish with the money.
- sleepychu 9y agoCan you provide a reference for your ebay claim?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThis is a horrible ad filled website, but Number 5. http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/ebay-buyer-seller-scams-fraud-5552823 http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/ebay-buyer-seller-scams-fraud-... I am curious why you thought this claim needed a reference. It seems like a pretty basic form of fraud everyone should be aware of.
- test1235 9y agoWhat 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.)
- gtsteve 9y agoI 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?
- microcolonel 9y ago> 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.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoI 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?
- rothbardrand 9y agoI 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.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoOh, 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 !
- dtien 9y agoFor 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-provide-rare-glimpse-inside-famously-opaque-art-market https://www.npr.org/2016/04/12/473856459/panama-papers-provi...
- forapurpose 9y agoPlenty 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.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoComplicated. 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.
- Artnome 9y agoProof the Dark Web Linduaer is photoshopped. https://www.artnome.com/news/2017/12/2/debunking-the-dark-web-sale-of-the-stolen-lindauer-painting https://www.artnome.com/news/2017/12/2/debunking-the-dark-we...