New wealth creation in the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China is allowing collectors to repatriate exquisite treasures that were sold abroad years ago. As prices have skyrocketed in response to demand, so have the number of counterfeits. Experts say the collectibles market in China is particularly susceptible to fraud because the pace of wealth creation has been too rapid for regulators to manage.

Nevertheless, it’s a mistake to think that all the newer forgeries are coming from China, says Annelien Bruins, chief operating officer and senior art advisor at New York-based Tang Art Advisory, which assists private and corporate clients in buying, selling and managing fine art and other collectibles. “The art market is so international, you can produce forgeries anywhere,” she says.

While it’s hard to say precisely which collectibles are most often counterfeited, criminals who forge fine art paintings seem to favor the 20th century. For one thing, older paintings, such as those from the Renaissance period, require more skill to counterfeit. The forged works of some modern artists, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, for example, are also easier to pass off because the artists were so prolific.

Counterfeiting wine is a relatively new deception. It began in the late 1970s when prices escalated for high-end wines from France’s Bordeaux region. Some criminals print sham labels and put them on bottles of cheaper wines. Others buy the empty bottles and corks of prized vintages (often from sommeliers at high-end restaurants), then refill and recork the bottles.

Counterfeit U.S. coins have been produced in China for decades. “The counterfeits used to be crude, with easily detectable errors, pitting and tool marks. Now they’re much more sophisticated and harder to detect,” says Matt Erskine, a fourth-generation estate-planning attorney and principal in Worcester, Mass.-based Erskine Company.

Erskine, whose family has been collecting rare coins and other valuables since the mid-1600s, says there’s a middle-market sweet spot where fraudsters can earn enough money to make the risk worth it, without attracting too much scrutiny. It takes counterfeiters a fair amount of time and effort to make decent forgeries. “They tend to copy collectibles that will bring enough value to compensate them for making the items, but are not so valuable that they attract a lot of attention. The easiest things to forge are those that were made in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands—coins, stamps, books—because you can take one and modify it slightly to make it look rarer.”

Tip-Offs To Rip-Offs
Modern science has made fraud detection somewhat easier through technologies such as ultraviolet fluorescence, infrared analysis, X-rays and carbon dating. There are, however, limits to the usefulness of these tools. Autograph forgers, for example, have been known to put the signatures of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle on old baseballs. Authentication requires more than just determining the age of the balls; it takes an expert in baseball memorabilia.

Forging artists’ signatures and putting counterfeit paintings in old frames stamped with the names of prominent auction houses are timeworn tricks. But fraudsters are also using new ploys, such as leaving items outdoors to weather-age them and adding authentic pieces to otherwise forged antique sculptures and furniture to subvert carbon dating. “They’re becoming smarter at circumventing technology,” says Bruins.

Not surprisingly, many fakes that start out as harmless replicas are later hawked as authentic works by unscrupulous collectors, dealers and auction houses. The fraud occurs when sellers portray the items as real, when they know they’re not.