Website to help recover stolen works of art launched news
01 July 2008

Two French auctioneers have set up a new web portal, stolen-and-wanted.com for recovering stolen art works that are never recovered. Illegal traffic in art works is the third largest illegal traffic in the world and 95 per cent of such stolen goods are never retrieved.

The site is owned by Armand Torossian, founder and chairman of the board of management of the interencheres.com website, which publishes public auction notices taking place in France, and Gérard Torossian, an auctioneer who specialises in setting up industrial auctions. The company is being financially supported by a group of private investors from the ICT sector in the Grenoble region.

The information stored on the website is registered by theft victims with the aim of helping them recovering their art objects through two innovative concepts:

  • Identification of the works on the basis of their references in authoritative publications
  • Rewards offered by the victims to increase the chances of recovering the stolen objects

The use of bibliographic references of the stolen works with the artist's catalogue is far more appropriate than the most detailed descriptions as they can greatly hamper reselling possibilities and since no dealer may put the work up for sale without mentioning these.

While access to the website is totally free of charge so as to maximise the number of visits to the site, the service also gives the victim the possibility of offering a reward at every step of the recovery process such as locating the work on internet, locating it physically, having the thieves and the receivers arrested and lastly, actually recovering the work.

The amount of the reward is entirely up to the theft victim.

The cost of putting the information on line is a fixed, independent of the value of the stolen goods and varies with the duration. for instance while the rate for five years is €300, those desirous of wanting the information up for an unlimited duration (it is not unusual to recover an object more than 30 years after it disappeared) is €500.

For the theft victim, this amount is comparable to the cost of a classified ad for a much more significant exposure, or else to that of the insurance premium he would have had to pay to cover the risk of theft of the sought-after work for a whole year.

This service also guarantees any buyer that the work he is purchasing is not a stolen work since under the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (Rome, 1995) the burden of responsibilty for ''Due Diligence'' prior to the purchase of a work of art vests solely on the purchaser.

The site is currently available in French, and will soon be in viewable in English, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.


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Website to help recover stolen works of art launched