Museum Worker Stole Paintings From Storage, Replaced Them With Bad Forgeries, Sold Them to Finance Lavish Lifestyle
Imagine a museum dedicated to science and technology who exhibits no artworks, but actually has a collection of hundreds of ‘often valuable’ paintings in storage.
This museum exists, in Germany, and was targeted by one of its former employees, who stole 4 works of art.
The worker at the Deutsches Museum, in Munich, stole paintings from the collection, and replaced them in storage with badly done forgeries.
He proceeded to sell these originals at auction, according to the court’s judgment, to finance a lavish lifestyle.
The New York Times reported:
“The worker, who is identified in court documents by the initials S.K., in keeping with German privacy law, was convicted of stealing four paintings by early-20th-century German artists from storerooms over nearly two years and avoiding detection by replacing the artworks with copies.
