'Ancient' statues fraud foiled by fake paperwork

A fraudster who tried to sell bogus ancient statues to Sotheby's was foiled when his fake accompanying paperwork was found to be written with printing methods that were 25 years too modern, a court heard.

Andrew Crowley, 46, of Longwell Green, Bristol, asked the auction house to value three Cycladic figures and an Anatolian stargazer statuette he had inherited from his grandfather.

He had presented fake invoices that purported to be written in 1976 - but forensics found they were made using printing methods invented in 2001.

Crowley, who admitted dishonestly making a false representation intending to make gain, was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court.

Crowley had tried to sell the statues to Sotheby's auction house in London between November 2022 and July 2023.

Prosecutors alleged that, if real, the items together would have been worth about £680,000 based on previous sales.

However, Judge Nicholas Rimmer said that estimate hinged on multiple hypotheticals and therefore reduced the value to £340,000.

The court heard the accompanying paperwork had been typed using a typewriter on paper embossed with an antiques dealers' logo – and even a nine-pence stamp.

"It was a crude attempt because Sotheby's spotted these documents as bogus fairly early on," Judge Rimmer said.

Sotheby's experts had also spotted multiple spelling mistakes, it was heard.

The judge accepted that Crowley had inherited the statues from his grandfather and did not at any point believe that they were counterfeits.

Therefore "the offending and dishonesty in this case must turn around the paperwork", he said.

The Cycladic statues were each about 30cm (7.9in) tall and weighed about 1kg, police said.

Legitimate Cycladics were made in the Cyclades, a group of islands in Greece, during the Bronze Age about 3,000 years ago.

Crowley was also ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and pay £1,630 in costs.

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