Art forgers and experts reveal the true story of fake art

The way Tony Tetro tells it, he didn’t start off as a forger. He wanted to sell his own art, but nobody would buy it. They preferred his copies of other artists’ work, and he was good at making them – very good. Soon gallerists were commissioning original works in the style of other artists. Then the money came rolling in. It’s a similar story with Robert Driessen. He spent a year at art school before dropping out and selling his own copies of Dutch romantic painters, before moving on to forge Expressionist, Impressionist and pop art paintings as well as sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse and, infamously, Alberto Giacometti. And while Wolfgang Beltracchi was raised in an artistic household and followed through with his artistic education, he found the art world stifling. He wanted to break the mould he felt he was being forced into. So, he started forging art.

In popular culture there’s a certain romance to art forgery: a white collar crime practised by intellectual, gentleman criminals. Art lovers getting one up on the establishment and making a pretty penny in the process. I don’t like to think of myself as a True Crime fanatic, but I’m fascinated by art heists, scams and forgeries. I love hearing about how they’re pulled off and the tricks of the trade, but I’m also interested in the personalities and the consequences of their actions. And, as I found out when I spoke to those whose lives are touched by forgeries – forgers, authenticators, lawyers and victims – the reality is much more complex. When you get on the topics of fakes and forgeries, everything that seems solid falls apart, like wet paint on a fresh plaster statue.

Artists have always copied other artists. There are all sorts of reasons: education, admiration and reproduction. Those are still true today: art students still learn by copying old masters, artists still create works ‘after’ other artists, and when top-tier collectors are worried about taking works out of their Swiss freeport to install in their superyachts, they can simply have someone knock up a few cheaper copies.

The idea of copying artworks to deceive and defraud people – forgery – is a relatively recent one tied up with the growth of the art market over the past century. The most recent estimate by Art Basel and UBS puts the value of the world’s art market at around $65B. This, combined with its notorious opacity – few public transaction records, no official registers and complex movements of money – makes it ripe for exploitation. The only question is how much.

To find out, I turned to Noah Charney, a professor of art history who specialises in art crime. For most of history, art crime was an inconvenience, rather than a subject to be studied. Charney changed that. In the late 2000s, he was a postgraduate student in art history at St. John’s College, Cambridge when he became interested in studying the underside of the art world. He pursued the subject, and in his words “founded the field of art crime research”. He’s featured on TV and radio documentaries and, quite literally, wrote the book on forgery: The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers (2015).

“Anyone who gives you a statistic is making it up. We have no idea at all,” Charney tells me. He’s dismissive of the anecdotal figures that get thrown around when talking about forgery: that 10% of all museum collections are fake, or that 50% of works on the market are fake. “You can ignore any of those statistics safely. It is certainly an issue, but it’s one of those issues that tends to make headlines only when there’s an extreme example.”

Despite Charney’s reassurances, those high-profile cases have helped make forgery and fraud the top concern among collectors: In 2022, 22 forged Jean-Michel Basquiats were seized by the FBI from the Orlando Museum of Art. The scandal resulted in the downfall of its director, Aaron De Groft. In 2011, New York’s historic Knoedler Gallery closed, following revelations it had sold forged artworks. An investigation revealed that between 1994–2008, collector Glafira Rosales had sold the gallery $80 million USD in forged artworks – most infamously a ‘Jackson Pollock’, signed “Pollok” – all painted by Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian. The same year, in London, the sale of a forged Frans Hals at Sotheby’s resulted in a number of lawsuits between the auction house and the consignors; Fairlight Art Ventures, owned by American hedge fund manager and art collector David Kowitz, and London’s Mark Weiss Gallery. The ‘Hals’ was originally owned by the French dealer and suspected forger Guiliano Ruffini, who remains on the run.

There are some areas of the art market where forgeries do represent a serious problem. According to Charney, the most frequently forged artworks are 20th-century lithographs by artists like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Salvador Dalí. “There are so many more of these in circulation than were actually made, that it is more likely that they’re forgeries than originals.”

Charney’s research shows that there’s a typical demographic profile of art forgers. Usually, they’re Caucasian, middle aged men who have strained relationships with women in their lives. He notes while women sometimes play key roles in the wider forgery network, there are no known female forgers. Typically, these men are disillusioned with the art world. Often they’re failed artists. Their response is to imitate established masters, proving their value as artists and the art world’s lack of expertise in identifying the imitation. As Charney points out this is a logical fallacy: if an expert is a fool, how good do you have to be to fool them?

I ask if Charney has any respect for forgers, on a purely artistic level. “I admire their skill and cleverness, and they seem like they’re more fun and less scary than most criminals. I use a term in my book: they’re ‘more prankster than gangster’. And I think that that’s apt. The world of crime is not full of people you would actually want to hang out with, but I would probably be happy to go for a beer with most of the forgers who I covered in my book.”

Another person who was first attracted to art crime by the “intrigue, fraud, big personalities and interesting stories” is Eleni Polycarpou, a litigation and arbitration specialist who heads up the art disputes practice at London law firm Withersworldwide. She’s been practising art-related litigation for 21 years. In that time, she’s come across many cases of forgery, and sadly in her experience, forgers aren’t the gentleman criminals of pop culture. Polycarpou outlined which laws could be broken in forgery cases.

First things first: copying an artwork isn’t a crime, otherwise all those art students would be in prison, it’s only a crime when you defraud someone; there has to be intent and there has to be money changing hands.

In court, no forgery cases are the same. “The laws that have been broken, and claims that can be brought, depend on who is the person complaining or bringing the claim,” she says. If a buyer of a forged artwork brings a case to court, then it’s a fraud claim. Usually, this is expressed as a type of misrepresentation – the seller lied about the identity of the artist and the buyer suffered as a result. In addition, there might be breaches of contract claims, depending on the terms of the sale. The artists’ estate might also claim misrepresentation and breach of intellectual property.

Some of the problems that litigants and lawyers face before they’re even in the courtroom include finding the money to put together the provenance and authenticity paperwork. “So much of the time, it is not proportionate to the value of the paintings. Sometimes the questions are whether some prints are authentic and that makes expending money even more difficult.” Sometimes, it’s a struggle finding out who exactly sold you the artwork. Sellers might hide behind auction houses or private dealers. “The buyer is left in a difficult position of having to first sue the auction house or the art dealer from whom they bought the paintings just to get the names of the sellers and by then, the sellers have disappeared or have no funds to reimburse the client for their losses.”

Once you’re in court, you still have to make your case, and authentication is a complex matter. There needs to be a clear provenance tracing back to the artist, and this requires research. Experts need to present their opinions, and often there are disagreements. Then, there are the artists’ estates. “It has happened to me that an artist’s estate has refused to provide a certificate of authenticity for a painting, despite informally accepting that it is authentic, because there is a gap in the paperwork for the provenance of the painting. Artist’s estates are understandably very careful these days because the market is flooded, more than ever, with fakes.”

It turns out that finding forgers was the easy part. Tetro, Driessen and Beltracchi all advertise their services online. Though, after their respective prison sentences, they stay strictly on the side of the law. Each of them has ended up producing ‘genuine fakes’ – artworks in the style of certain artists. They’re almost perfect reproductions, except for the prominent forgers’ signatures on the fronts and backs of the works. They’ve published books. They’ve had documentaries made about them. These days, they’re content creators, just like everybody else.

Beltracchi was born in 1951 in West Germany. “I grew up with art,” he writes to me by email. “My father was a church painter and restorer. His brothers painted, my siblings were artists, my daughter is an artist.” Between 17 and 21, he studied at the art academy in Aachen. Here he learned painting “the classical way.” “My professors taught me art where my father’s education had left gaps.” Beltracchi never graduated. In his version of events, he left the academy without a diploma because “I didn’t see any point in such papers.” Beltracchi was more interested in living the hippie lifestyle. “I went to art happenings, music festivals, took LSD and lived a lifestyle like many others tried to do at the time. Make love not war.”

According to Beltracchi, it was early success, rather than rejection, that led to disappointment with the art world and his pivot to forgery. In 1978, he exhibited his own works at the Haus der Kunst in Munich “with great success. At that time, I received as much for my paintings as my father earned in a whole year.” This led to him being “bombarded” by gallery owners who only wanted variations of his works. “Recognisability was already the key word for brand building back then. I didn’t want to become one of those slaves who work for the market and no longer have any freedom.”

Beltracchi tells me that over the course of his 30-year career he forged the work of around 120 artists (although news reports from 2012 quote him as saying around 50). Unusually, Beltracchi sold directly to clients. He claimed that the paintings came from the family collection of his wife, Helene. His deception involved fake paintings, fake labels and even making fake photographs to establish false provenance – the chain of ownership that proves an artwork is authentic. Beltracchi likes to boast about the degree of research he put into his forgeries. He says that his forgeries were excellent because he immersed himself in the life of the artists. “I travelled to the places where he worked. I read his letters as far as possible, researched his environment. Like a method actor, I put myself in the painter’s shoes and painted a new work in his style, in the same movement and time as he did it.”

He frames his actions as an intellectual crime, if a crime at all. It was exciting to learn how experts judge artistic works. It wasn’t primarily about making a lot of money, but rather about achieving freedom through art. The fact that you also got good money for your paintings was a pleasant side effect.”

Questions had circulated about Beltracchi’s sales, but he’d always come up with an answer. But in 2010 the scam suddenly fell apart. Beltracchi sold a ‘Heinrich Campendonk’ to a Malta based company for €2.88M. After the sale, pigment analysis proved beyond doubt that the painting was a forgery. Beltracchi had gotten lazy, and bought a tube of lead white from an art shop that happened to contain trace amounts of titanium white, a pigment which wasn’t invented in Campendonk’s time. Beltracchi was convicted of 14 counts of forging of six well-known artists, including Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Kees van Dongen. A deal saw Beltracchi sentenced to six years, and his wife Helene to four, and total damages of €35M. When you take into account the scale of their forgery – it’s now estimated that Beltracchi’s forgeries earned him more than $100M – and the fact they served their sentence in open prisons and were released early, it was a pretty mild sentence.

“I was able to work [in custody] because the prison doctor was a fan of mine. I never stopped working. Since the trial, my wife and I have written a few books, made films, and done exhibitions and projects. We have an exciting, fulfilling life.”

Are the works still out there? “I sometimes see one of my paintings; I remain silent and walk on. Why should I harm a museum?” At the same time, he’s dismissive of the contemporary art world. “The art world has nothing to do with art, they don’t care about art and artists. It’s about marketable goods. About marketable exhibitions, about marketable art literature, et cetera. Nothing has changed. Why should it? Art is business for the art world. In addition to the elite art world, there are also artists and art projects that create great art independently. I don’t need the art world – I’m free.”

Before I call Robert Driessen, he has one thing to say. “The art world is fucking rotten.” Driessen was born in 1959 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In 1998, he gave up Europe for Thailand, where he opened a restaurant on Ko Samui. He’s there as I speak to him. Our phone call is punctuated by the screeching of tropical birds.

Like Beltracchi, Driessen was an art student who felt constrained by the education system. While his coursemates at the Arnhem Art Academy were content making paintings and collecting artist grants from the government, Driessen wanted something more. He quit, and started painting his own Dutch landscapes. The problem was, “the things I made, nobody wanted to buy. I was so frustrated. And I thought about all these paintings I saw in my life. I thought, well, I can do that. And they sold very well.”

He painted and sold copies of 19th-century Dutch and English romantic artists: Paul Gabriel, Hendrick Willem Mesdag and Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch. “I did ten in a row and people came back and asked for more.” He soon found that these skills to be more valuable making forgeries than copies. He worked to order, for “two or three” middlemen, who commissioned the forgeries and handled the sales. The demand at the time was for Expressionists, Impressionists and Pop Art.

In 1987, Driessen started making sculptures. It was an interesting turn. In some ways, sculptures are more difficult to fake, they require moulds, materials and machines to cast and work the metal. But the market for sculptures is flooded with artist proofs and maquettes and, surprisingly, even murkier than that of paintings. By 1997, Driessen was specialising in Giacometti, at the time the most expensive sculptor on the market, though he also made others: Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, “the lot”.

The demand was enormous. “I couldn’t do it alone anymore”, so he “got a little help”. Driessen reckons that he, along with a handful of assistants, made somewhere around 2,500 sculptures and 4-5,000 paintings. He put his productivity down to fairly common, unsophisticated techniques: mirroring works or making composites of different existing artworks. It could take him as little as 30 minutes to make a small ‘Giacometti’, a work that might sell for around €20,000.

Driessen puts his success down to the fact few people knew what he was doing, and those who did were all making good money. The police estimated the gang made around €8M ($10.4M), and Driessen pocketed €3M personally. He projects the image of a family man, using the money to send his son to university and to buy his wife a new car in the Christmas sales. It was only after his arrest and when he heard how much his middlemen had been making, that he found out he was being “paid peanuts”.

Driessen’s downfall began in 2009, when some of his regular clients in Germany got “greedy” and tried to pull off an audacious sale of around 300 Giacometti sculptures to two US galleries for a total of $50M. The galleries were suspicious, the numbers didn’t add up. As of today, the Alberto Giacometti Database, the online catalogue raisonné of Giacometti’s works, lists only 855 sculptures. Soon, members of Driessen’s German network were arrested. Police discovered a warehouse containing around 1,000 forged sculptures. Now, they were looking for Driessen, but as a Dutch citizen living in Thailand, Driessen couldn’t be extradited. He spent several years effectively on the run.

It all came to an end in July 2014, when Driessen was arrested in Amsterdam, having travelled back for his ex-wife’s birthday. It was an open and shut case. He was sentenced to five years and three months and served around half of that. “It actually wasn’t that difficult,” says Driessen, explaining that his guards knew he ran a restaurant, and gave him an espresso machine and good quality ingredients in exchange for cooking and dining with them. I can only imagine what stories he told at those dinners.

He keeps some secrets. He frequently sees his work out in the world. He laughs, “I’m confronted all the time. People send me pictures, ‘is that your work?’ It’s in museums and galleries and private collections. It’s all over the place.” People still approach him about making forgeries, but he’s given all that up. He makes copies of Giaccometti’s work, but they’re all above board, under his own name – no fake signatures, no fake foundry marks – “I don’t do naughty things,” he says. “You can buy a copy and I’ll make a copy, but I’m not gonna sign it anymore. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not gonna go to jail. Two years, eight months… and probably more now if I do it again.”

He says that he never felt guilty. But he still holds a burning resentment of the “fucking rotten” art world. In his experience, auction houses, galleries and experts are willing to overlook issues with artworks so long as they’re “half true”. “They’ll sell stuff because they need stuff to sell. And it’s easier to sell because the price is lower, and they estimate it a lot higher.” He describes how sales at smaller auction houses, those who have “absolutely no clue” when it comes to authentication, are exploited by criminals to build up a legitimate provenance for forged artworks.

The larger auction houses aren’t immune either. Driessen describes how one time a client of his tried to sell a ‘Matisse’ plaster sculpture that wasn’t even dry. When it was presented in front of the experts at one of London’s leading auction houses, a piece of wet plaster fell off the work. Driessen laughs, “the expert didn’t say nothing, the client didn’t say nothing, and the client took the sculpture away and the good thing is he got the estimate, £3-400,000.” The client was very happy, he commissioned Driessen to make three more of the same.

It’s early evening in London, and morning in Los Angeles when I ring Tony Tetro. It’s been 55 years since the 74-year-old self-taught artist from Fulton, New York moved out west to southern California, but he hasn’t lost his accent. He’s more than happy to talk about the old days. He reminisces about his house (a three-storey condo in Claremont, LA) and his cars (at one point he owned a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit, a Ferrari, a self-built fake Ferrari and a Lamborghini Countach). When I ask why he got into forgery, he’s got a simple answer. “I was unemployed. And I was trying to sell paintings.”

It was the 1970s and LA’s art scene was small, but growing. Tetro would visit art fairs held in local parks, which were little more than stalls set up where people sold their own work. Minimalism was in, in a big way. He didn’t have much respect for it. “Most of the paintings were just a colour. You know, somebody slaps something on a big canvas so that it matches somebody else’s sofa.” Tetro found a niche for copies of old masters and modernists: Rembrandt, Monet, Dalí. At first, he openly sold them as reproductions, but everything changed when he read Clifford Irving’s book Fake: the story of Elmyr de Hory. “I thought, I could do this.” The first forgery he made was a drawing based on a painting by Amedeo Modigliani. In the painting, a nude woman is lying down on a bed, so Tetro adapted this and drew her sitting up in the same bed. “I took it to Sotheby’s, that didn’t help much, and then I took it to different galleries. I took it to one auction house and they gave me $1,600. So that’s how I started. I actually have to blame everything on the book by Clifford Irving.“

Tetro specialised in a few select artists, among them, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. He prides himself, and has been praised by others, on his close attention to detail. He went out of his way to ensure that the materials and methods he used were correct for the period and the artist. He made trips to Europe to buy old canvases and stretchers that he couldn’t find in the US. He also took great care to hide his work. He worked through middlemen. He met only a handful of clients face to face, most didn’t know who he was – many assumed he was Italian. At home, his storage room was concealed by a false wall fitted with a phone-activated electronic lock. “I had tons of lithographs in there. I had tons of paper: Arches, the paper that Dalí, Chagall and Miró used. Miró used a paper called Guaro, I had stacks of that. And I had hanging equipment, I had light tables for tracing, I had vintage typewriters – they were important, I typed up certificates of authenticity.”

By the 1980s, Tetro was living somewhere between secrecy and celebrity. He says he was always open about his profession, calling himself a copyist, and having business cards printed, reading: “Anthony Tetro, Art Reproductions”. In some parts of the LA art scene, dealers would joke to each other, “is that a Miró or a Tetro?” He earned good money, ate well, lived well and partied hard – his neighbours and the local cops assumed he was a drug dealer.

Around this time, Tetro started forging watercolours by a Japanese artist named Hiro Yamagata. “He was a Japanese artist living in LA. He had his own style and he was becoming popular, but I made him a superstar when I got arrested.” In 1989, Mark Henry Sawicki, a gallerist and client of Tetro’s, sold a forged watercolour to another gallery just a block away from Martin Lawrence, the Beverly Hills gallery that represented Yamagata. One day, Yamagata walked past the gallery and spotted the forgery, the game was up. Even today, nearly 40 years later, Tetro can’t believe it. “He shouldn’t have done that. He knew that Martin Lawrence had an exclusive, he shouldn’t have sold it to the gallery next door!” The police traced the work back to Sawicki, who was charged with ten counts of art forgery and grand theft. Sawicki cut a deal with the prosecutors and offered up Tetro. “He says, ‘he’s the big fish’, he called me that, ‘you want the big fish?’ and so he got probation for ratting on me…”

Up until this moment, Tetro had had a run of good luck – he never entertained the idea that he would be caught. Now, he was charged with 29 counts of forging Yamagata watercolours and 38 felony counts of forging lithographs of paintings by Chagall, Miró and Norman Rockwell. At the trial, Sawicki told the court that his business with Tetro was worth around $100,000. That’s the detail that sticks with Tetro. “I found out when I was arrested that everybody, every one of my art dealers made much more money than I did. I was really not that good of a businessman. They were buying things from me, let’s say $500 for a lithograph and they would sell it for $5,000.”

Tetro poured his remaining money into his defence lawyers. He sold everything, including his fake Ferrari, it hurt, but it was worth it. His lawyers successfully argued that while Tetro had made copies, he hadn’t intended to defraud anyone. They pointed out that despite a well-publicised call for victims to come forward, none had. In 1993, after four years and one mistrial, Tetro was cleaned out; he couldn’t afford the retrial and pled no contest. He says the judge didn’t know what to do with him, in the end he got a year in prison and 200 hours community service. 30 years later, he stands by that no contest plea and feels no guilt.

“Let me tell you why: they never got hurt. Nobody. I’ve talked to my art dealers over the last 30 years and I say ‘You ever get bitten on the ass or anything?’ They go ‘no’. Have you heard of anything or anybody? And they go ‘no’… Nobody got hurt. There was no victim. Nobody knows they’ve got a fake Chagall, nobody knows they’ve got a fake anything. So you asked me a question: do I feel bad? I would feel bad if they got hurt; they did not get hurt.”

If anything, Tetro speaks with pride, amazement and a little envy that one of his Dalí forgeries, Nuclear Disintegration of the Head of a Virgin, which was seized during the investigation, is still hanging over the desk of the Los Angeles District Attorney.

Once a forgery is on the market, it can stay there undetected for years. If anyone’s likely to question its authenticity, it’ll be an appraiser. It’s their job to value artworks ahead of sales, they often work closely with art authenticators to attribute artworks to artists and to ensure that their appraisals are accurate, and unfortunately they’re often the first to break the bad news to clients.

Elizabeth Pisano is the business development director in the Mid-Atlantic region at the Winston Art Group, and an appraiser of American and 20th-century art. Previously, she was the vice president and senior specialist in American art at Sotheby’s. Like many experts, she started at the bottom, as a cataloguer at Sotheby’s. The job involved the kind of detail-focussed work familiar to authenticators, double checking that catalogue details of artworks (physical dimensions, materials, provenance, exhibition history, et cetera) were correct. Boring, but necessary, for future appraisal and authentication.

“Within my specific field, they aren’t that common, but they do definitely happen and there have been some very famous cases involving artists that I work with directly. The most well-known American art forger is probably Ken Perenyi, who forged hundreds of works by 19th-century American painters,” she explains. The vast majority of the cases aren’t forgery, simply mistaken identity. “They just have a landscape that looks like it could be an Albert Bierstadt, for example. It’s then up to us to do the necessary research and rely on the appropriate experts to make a determination.”

Over the years, Pisano has learned to pick up on the “red flags” that might indicate an artwork is misattributed, or fake. “Provenance, or the history of the work’s ownership is a big one. For example, if a work by Martin Johnson Heade comes across my desk and there is no history before popping up in a private collection in Florida in the 1990s, and it’s not already included in literature on the artist, it is probably a long shot that the attribution could be confirmed. There are also stylistic concerns: does the work look consistent with the artist’s larger body of work? Does the signature look consistent with those on known works by the artist? Ultimately, some of it comes down to instinct. If something doesn’t feel right to an expert in that field, it probably isn’t.”

Pisano notes that there are no consistent methods used by appraisers and authenticators. So much of the job comes down to gut feelings, instinct and knowing who exactly to trust.

“Some artists have recognised experts who will still review works and comment on attribution. Other artists have formal committees that review works together. Some artists have published catalogues raisonné that are easy to use while others don’t or they are in progress. It can vary widely, so it’s important to make sure you know who the appropriate people are to contact and most importantly, when to walk away from an appraisal or sale if the attribution cannot be confirmed.”

I’m curious to know if a career spent analysing paintings has made her more suspicious. “Actually the opposite. I think it has made me more optimistic. I was trained to treat every situation or work like it is not a fake or a forgery until we can definitively determine, to the extent possible, that it is not. When you are able to play a small role in identifying a work by a known, valuable artist, it is a great feeling.” But it doesn’t always work out that way. “It is also fair to say that at times we are in the business of heartbreak. I always try to convey the fact that it is better to know as soon as possible that your work of art is not authentic before you make any hugely impactful decisions based on its perceived value.”

When a buyer – a collector, an auction house or a museum – feels a knot of doubt forming in their stomach, they might want to call in a second opinion. If that’s the case, they would turn to some such as Denis Moiseev, founder and CEO of independent art authentication company, Hephaestus. Art runs in Moiseev’s family; his father was a conservator and he studied art history. “I’ve always been drawn into the idea of understanding forgery, understanding the complexities surrounding it,” he tells me over the phone. He founded Hephaestus in 2018 with the mission of “eliminating forgery in the art market”. Bold ambitions.

“The art world has been complacent. Part of that complacency comes from the fact that the majority of forgeries that have been identified by the market, even though they’ve got into the market, have not been particularly good quality forgeries, ” he says. “Frankly, the methods used by the art world generally aren’t really up to standard. It’s incredibly fragmented. There are varying levels of quality. And due diligence standards aren’t regulated. Wherever you go, people will do things differently, in varying qualities, and spend different amounts of time and money on due diligence.”

In contrast, Hephaestus has spent the past six years developing protocols for testing: sets of consistent, proven scientific tests that can be compared against one another. Their methods include traditional provenance research alongside scientific analysis: Raman spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, and Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-Rays. Recently, they’ve been experimenting with machine-learning pattern recognition, analysing brushstrokes and other details with accuracy beyond the human eye. Taking leads from ‘white hat’ hackers in the tech industry, Hephaestus works directly with forgers to test its protocols. It’s about removing the weakest link in the chain: the psychological element of authentication. Moiseev sums it up: “Once you start believing in something, once you start seeing data align, you start believing in it more and more.” I ask him for further details, but he’s hesitant to reveal more. Moiseev describes the situation as an arms race; authenticators, conservators and forgers are all dealing with the same information and often the same tools. “There is no reason why technology can’t be used on the other side to try and produce more complex, believable forgeries.”

“The way that we view things is that authenticity is ultimately a bit of a data problem. Once you have enough data showing how an artist produces their work – their techniques and materials – you’re able to get a really good sense of what makes their art unique. That data can come in the form of just images, or work, it could be scientific data, such as the pigments that they use, it could come in terms of technique, how do they prepare their ground? How do they typically use under drawings?”

During our conversation, Moiseev tentatively suggests that forgery might be a solved problem. Hephaestus claims a 98.2% accuracy in identifying authentic works of art, citing a recent case study which compared the work of Italian masters Canaletto and Bellotto.

The problem, he admits, is convincing clients to use Hephaestus’ services. The truth can be expensive. There’s the cost of employing his company’s services, and then there’s the potential cost of finding out you’re dealing with a forgery. Some buyers and sellers will have invested so much money in a work that they won’t want to take the risk of questioning its authenticity. In this view, there’s a strange parallel between Moiseev and Driessen’s view of the art world: often, ignorance is bliss.

So far, there’s one party I haven’t touched on: the victims. It was difficult to find anyone willing to talk about their experience. Perhaps understandably, many victims don’t go around telling everyone they were scammed. After a week of unanswered emails, I found one willing to talk.

Rupert Maas is the owner of Maas Gallery on London’s Duke Street. He’s also a familiar face on TVs around the country as one of the resident 19th-century painting experts on Antiques Roadshow. In 2002, Maas was approached by Robert Thwaites, an unemployed graphics teacher with failing eyesight, who claimed to have inherited a painting by John Anster Fitzgerald, a Victorian-era artist who specialised in paintings of fairies. Maas knew a buyer for the work, and even though he thought it was “a little off,” he saw a deal to be made. Before he bought the work, he took it to a “very reputable” conservator, who assured him it was 19th-century. He sold the work, and all was fine, until a few months later when a second painting by the same artist emerged.

“It was sort of off-key slightly, in the same way that the picture I bought was, but more so,” he tells me, “and I thought this one is definitely wrong. And then I thought if that one’s wrong, then my one is wrong. So I went back and I’d asked my client to bring me the picture back again. And I said, ‘look, I’m really sorry, I think I’ve made a terrible mistake…’” Technical analysis revealed trace amounts of titanium yellow pigment in the painting. The pigment was invented in 1906, the year that Fitzgerald died. Maas refunded the buyer, and passed information onto the police, but that didn’t matter, the papers had already got hold of it – Antiques Roadshow expert paid £20,000 for forged art – sometimes the headlines write themselves.

“I felt like an idiot. I thought I knew that artist. But the weird thing is, now I would never have been taken in by it and I can’t believe I was,” he reflects “When your eyes are calibrated to see what is wrong, you wonder why you ever thought it was right.”

So, why exactly do people fall for forgeries? “Sometimes it’s a good picture, even if it’s a forgery, it’s just really beautiful, or odd or interesting, or in some way appealing. But in the dealer’s case, it’s because I wanted to make a profit. I buy and sell pictures all the time for profit and I saw a profit in this one and I wanted to buy it. I was wary, not wary enough I suppose,” Maas explains. “In a way, I wanted to believe it. This is what forgers rely on, that cupidity, that desire to have a bargain perhaps, or to pay less for something that might be worth more if it was 100% accredited.”

Maas’ story takes an unexpected turn. “The police wanted to keep the painting I’d bought as evidence, but the client was so enthused and enjoyed the whole thing so much that I got it back from the police and sold it to him at a much reduced rate, because he loved it… He loved the idea of deception and the fairies and the idea of another world. I think he maybe even preferred it more to his originals, and he had several.”

Some forgeries may be high quality, but Maas has no respect for the forgers themselves. “These people are criminals. The sort of slightly “Raffles” sense that they’re in some way putting one over the experts is absolute nonsense. They’re criminals. And usually there‘s resentment playing out. There’s often a motive beyond money making. It’s wanting to put one over the market. The very fact that they’re talking to you means that there’s a vanity element. The best forgers, and they do exist, aren’t known about at all. They’re really dark. And there are plenty of those, believe me.”

He’s not wrong. There are plenty of people out there who fit Charney’s criminal profile: white men, struggling in life, looking for money and disappointed with the art world. And there’ll always be more. The question is whether, given growing awareness and fear of fraud, fluctuating markets and technological developments, is a perfect forgery possible in today’s world or is forgery a dying art?

But Beltracchi sees a bright future for good forgers. “Experts are only as good as the counterfeiter is bad. Technologically, there will always be perfect counterfeits. The claim that AI can detect counterfeits is very exaggerated, the technology is still a long way from that. There will always be someone who can surpass even the latest technologies.” Beltracchi uses his own work as evidence that perfect forgeries can and do exist. “If there were no flawless fakes, many of my works would not still be on display in museums today.”

Driessen takes the opposite view. “No, it’s not possible. No. Not possible.” He says that recently he finished an almost perfect copy of a Roy Lichtenstein. The work took him a month and it’s “99% accurate,” he says.

Tetro readily admits that his lithographs would easily be found out. He produced them to fool the eye, not the scientific tools available today. The only reason they haven’t been discovered is that, to his knowledge, nobody has ever done a pigment analysis of lithographic prints. The costs would outweigh the benefits. Tetro says that these days, you’re more likely to find people buying up old works and adapting them to give them new identities – perhaps a student of Rembrandt becomes a Rembrandt – this way, analytical tools can be fooled and the decision ultimately comes down to connoisseurs, who can also be fooled.

Moiseev believes the technology exists to identify forgeries. Now, the goal is to make forgery such an expensive process that it becomes uneconomical. “If the art world decides to do full analysis through a company like Hephaestus, the cost and burden of creating the forgery is going to be so high that I don’t think it would pass our tests. But even if it did, it would have to be such a ludicrously expensive contract. I don’t see it happening.” He admits the problem they currently face is how to create incentives for authentication. He doesn’t believe this will come from legislation, the art world simply isn’t important enough. “I think those incentives have to be provided by the sellers. If they want to differentiate themselves, I think it needs to be pushed by the buyers who want to acquire things, knowing that they’re real and authentic.”

The most interesting response was from Maas. I expected that he might be familiar with the saying ‘once bitten, twice shy’, but when I ask whether the experience has affected him, his response surprises me. “Absolutely not. No. I still take risks on a daily basis – or a weekly basis at least – it’s just how you do it as an art dealer, you get used to it. I’ve bought quite a few fakes in my time, and I’ll buy more. But you know, there it is, you live and you learn.”

Charney’s take turns everything on its head. In his view, the success of forgeries is less down to technical skills than confidence tricks that he calls “provenance traps.” “The basic premise of all of them is that forgers are most successful when they create what appear to be lost works by famous artists. They are not successful if they try to copy an excellent work.” Many forgeries are poorly executed, but they play on the enthusiasm for experts to discover lost and misattributed artworks: “The most exciting thing that can happen to an expert.” In other words, forgeries will continue to be a problem so long as there are experts playing “Indiana Jones.”

I think forgers will be around for some time yet. You can frustrate their work and you can throw them in prison, but there’ll always be someone out there looking to make a quick buck. The inconvenient truth is that art forgers are useful. They satisfy a need at almost every level of the market: they help buyers, dealers and experts meet demand for deals, profits and original art. As much as they can break an artist’s market, they can also build one. Everyone, almost everyone, has a reason to look the other way. Money, of course, explains a lot but it doesn’t explain everything. No one sets out knowing they’re going to be a millionaire. They’re driven by thrill seeking: the thrill of creating and pulling off a forgery, of seeing your work in a gallery and knowing the truth. And you can’t kill that drive. It might be a logical fallacy to believe that all experts are fools, and you’re a genius because you fooled them, but it sure feels good.